Debriefing
In lexical decision experiments, participants usually respond faster to words than non-words. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence that we have mental representations for words in a mental lexicon that we access during word recognition. We are slower at recognizing non-words for a number of reasons, one of which is that we sometimes have to search the whole mental lexicon before we can indicate that a word is a non-word, which takes longer than searching the lexicon and finding a word. You will see this paradigm used again in the Semantic Priming and Word Frequency Effect Discovery Labs.