Final answer:
Lexical decision tasks require participants to make "word" and "nonword" decisions when presented with letter strings.
Step-by-step explanation:
Lexical decision tasks require participants to make "word" and "nonword" decisions when presented with letter strings. In these tasks, participants are shown a series of letter strings and they have to quickly decide whether each string is a real word or a non-word.
For example, a participant might be shown the letter string 'BLONE' and they would have to quickly decide that it is a non-word because it does not represent a real word in the English language. On the other hand, if they are shown the letter string 'TABLE', they would have to respond that it is a word because it represents a real word.
This type of task is a common way to study word recognition and the mental processes involved in quickly determining whether a string of letters corresponds to a known word or not.