LexTALE

Background

The Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English (LexTALE) is a quick, free and standardized vocabulary assessment tool intended for cognitive researchers to evaluate language proficiency in individuals with an advanced level of English as a second language. The test was published by Kristin Lemhöfer and Mirjam Broersma in 2012 (official lexTALE website).

LexTALE takes takes about 5 minutes to complete and reliably gauges a participant's vocabulary size and overall language mastery. The specific test words were selected using item-response theory to clearly differentiate between medium, advanced, and native levels of language capability. While originally created for English, LexTALE has been adapted for other languages, e.g. Dutch and German.

Task Procedure

Participants work on 63 items total. The first three items are 'warm-up' or practice items to familiarize participants with the procedure and don't contribute to the final score. Of the 60 test items, 40 are words and 20 are nonwords. Below each word, participants are provided a 'yes' and a 'no' button to evaluate whether the presented item is an English word. Participants are instructed to selected the 'yes' button if they know the word to be an English word, even if they may not reliably know what it means. In any other case, they should select the 'no' button. There is no response time limit and participant can take as much time as they need to respond. A progress bar at the bottom of the screen signals the test progression.

What it Measures

The Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English (LexTALE) is a measure of language proficiency

Psychological domains

• Psycholinguistics (Language Processing & Representation): Ability to acquire, store, and comprehend words
• Bilingualism: Effects of cross-language competition and language dominance
• Executive Function & Cognitive Control: Inhibitory control and conflict monitoring in bilingualism

Main Performance Metrics

• avgPercentCorrect: the non-weigted mean of percent correct responses to words and the percent correct responses to non-words (Note: there are more words than nonwords in LexTALE)

Psychiatric Conditions

LexTale is mainly used in academic settings.

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit LexTALE.

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Lemhöfer, K., & Broersma, M. (2012).Behavior research methods, 44, 325-343.

Martinez-Garcia, Maria Teresa, & Tremblay, Annie. (2016). Effects of language bias and proficiency on cross-language activation: Evidence from eye-tracking. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(4), 3341.

Chen, Xuemei, & Dewaele, Jean-Marc. (2019). The relationship between English proficiency and humour appreciation among English L1 users and Chinese L2 users of English. Applied Linguistics Review, 10(4), 653-676.

Tatsuya, Nakata, Yu, Tamura, & Scott, Aubrey. (2020). Examining the Validity of the LexTALE Test for Japanese College Students. The Journal of AsiaTEFL, 17(2), 335-348.