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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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there’s not a direct easy conversion AFAIK

I gave one in an edit.


But I think all the study did was check whether the participants knew it was a word or not by having them pick out the real ones from a list of gibberish.

More or less.

For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant who responded “yes” to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33 nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 – 2/33 = 76% of the English vocabulary. Participants could do the test multiple times and always got a different sample of words and nonwords.

But they largely replicated the results by administering three ordinary multiple-choice vocabulary tests, with r = 0.69 vs. the original test.