Hello Brielle,
in patient studies it might indeed be good to avoid additional cognitive components like task switching or at least, keep them as low as possible. Thus a block design seems to be advantageous in general. A block design has some limitations, however. Probably you won't be able to differentiate between correct and error trials. This might be relevant though if you want to look at only those trials in which patients succeed. Otherwise you might find differences between conditions which are just related to the fact that the patients fail in one condition and perform well in another.
I'm not sure whether I understood your paradigm correctly, but there seem to be three factors "rhyming" (yes/no), "orthography" (similar/dissimilar) and "task" (rhyming judgement / baseline judgement), resulting in eight conditions overall. If you went with the block design, would one block correspond to one particular condition? Or would there be several conditions within a block?
I also wonder about the balancing, there are only 4 different words for "rhyming & similar orth.", 5 for "non-rhyming & similar orth." and "non-rhyming & dissimilar orth.", but 16 = many for "rhyming & dissimilar orth.". Does this mean rhyming words are more frequent or that some words are presented several times and more frequently than others? Maybe this has some influence on the performance? Or is this intended? Just to make sure :-)
Best,
Helmut
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