A construct validation study of time-sensitive word-knowledge measures
Bronson Hui, Aline Godfroid, Irina Elgort · 2022
Researchers increasingly use response-time tasks, along with untimed, accuracy-basedtasks, to measure lexical knowledge. While these tasks are set up differently and areinherently time sensitive, there is no empirical evidence on whether they also tap intoqualitatively different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge. In this article, we report avalidation study involving five timed and untimed measures for assessing 40, 2K-5Kfrequency English words. One hundred and forty-five learners took (1) an untimedmeaning recognition test, (2) an untimed form recall test, (3) a Yes-No response time (RT)test (affording both accuracy and RT measures), and (4) a masked repetition priming task.Confirmatory factor analysis suggests that these measures can be placed on one or twopsychometric dimensions, whereby the one-factor solution (suggesting they measure oneconstruct) is preferred for parsimony. However, the two-factor model had a marginallystronger predictive validity for explaining self-reported proficiency. Our results highlightthe value of incorporating response-time measures in vocabulary research although thejury is still out on the theorization of vocabulary knowledge as a one- or two-dimensionalconstruct.