Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1452867

An Experimental Study of The Effect of Anxiety on Lexical Processing of College Students： Evidence from True-False Word Judgment and Semantic Category Judgment Tasks

Provisionally accepted
张 Huiyong 张 Huiyong *Pu xinping Pu xinping
  • Institute of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study examined the effect of anxiety on lexical processing among 53 college students with anxiety in China. We conducted two experiments in a stressful environment to induce anxiety. Experiment 1 investigated the impact of anxiety on lexical processing through a true-false word judgment task, while Experiment 2 further explored this effect using a semantic category judgment task. Both experiments revealed no significant difference in the accuracy of lexical judgments between participants with high and low anxiety. However, there was a notable difference in the reaction times for lexical judgments, with high-anxiety participants exhibiting longer reaction time compared to their low-anxietycounterparts. This indicates a decrease in the efficiency of lexical processing among those with high anxiety. The results suggest that anxiety diminishes lexical processing efficiency without affecting lexical judgment performance. These findings support the processing efficiency theory.

    Keywords: Anxiety, True-false word judgments, semantic categories, Lexical Processing, college students

    Received: 21 Jun 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Huiyong and xinping. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: 张 Huiyong, Institute of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.