This paper reports on the methodology, development and results of the implementation of a lexical decision test that objectively measures exposure to specialized terminology. A 1,026,107-word corpus from research articles on food science and nutrition in Spanish was collected and a list of 871 term candidates was extracted. Then two experts in the area were asked to confirm the final selection of terms. in addition, 54 highly frequent prefixes specific of food science and nutrition were identified and combined with high-frequency word roots to develop a series of 112 non-words. A final selection of 160 terms and 40 nonwords was made to complete a 200-word check-list. a total of 104 undergraduate students of food science and nutrition of the UAQ (autonomous university of quertaro) participated in the study. The students belonged to the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th semester of the university program. Forty high-school students served as a control group. The results revealed that the number of terms the participants knew increased according to the number of semesters they had studied food science, and the number of words known was significantly different among groups. These findings show the possibility and effectiveness of using this type of lexical decision test to evaluate the development of specialized vocabulary knowledge.
