Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) method has produced several prominent findings in sentence processing. While a substantial number of SAT studies has yielded statistical null results regarding the degree to which certain factors influence the speed of sentence processing operations, the statistical power of the SAT paradigm is not known. As a result, it is not entirely clear how to interpret these findings. We addressed this problem by means of a simulation study in which we simulated SAT experiments for a range of known effect sizes in order to determine the statistical power in typical SAT experiments. We found that while SAT experiments appear to have quite satisfactory power to detect differences in asymptotic accuracy, that is not the case for speed-related parameters. We conclude that the failure to find an effect in speed-related parameters in SAT experiments may be less meaningful than previously thought.