The Psychometrics of Several Neural Measures of Lexical Access in Children with Autism

Abstract

Lexical access, the cognitive process of finding a word in one’s mental lexicon (part of the process of word recognition), is an important part of the development of receptive and expressive language. Before we can test theories about the role of lexical access in explaining language development variance in children with autism, we need measures of lexical access with good psychometric properties. Event-related potentials (ERPs) hold promise as measures of lexical access. However, there are different approaches to ERP data analysis and variable derivation, and the validity and reliability of various ERP measures that might quantify lexical access are unknown. The proposed study examined the relative validity and reliability of several ERP measures that purportedly quantify individual differences in lexical access.