Untitled

Abstract

Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several criteria associated with lexical access provide evidence of facilitatory effects of orthographic neighborhood size and no significant evidence of inhibitory effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency on lexical access. The words used in Experiment 1 had few neighbors that were higher in frequency. In Experiment 2, the words employed had several neighbors that were higher in frequency. Both experiments showed that words possessing few neighbors evoked slower responses than those possessing many neighbors. Also, in both experiments, neighborhood size effects occurred even though words from large neighborhoods had more potentially interfering higher-frequency neighbors than words from small neighborhoods.

Cross-lingual neighborhood effects in generalized lexical decision and natural reading.

“…As Andrews (1997) argued in a review paper, large neighborhoods are almost always associated with better performance in standard lexical decision tasks. Indeed, most of these experiments pointed toward a facilitatory effect of increasing neighborhood size, for both the speed and accuracy of lexical decision (Andrews, 1989, 1992; Carreiras, Perea, & Grainger, 1997; Forster & Shen, 1996; Huntsman & Lima, 2002; Johnson & Pugh, 1994; Laxon, Coltheart, & Keating, 1988; Perea & Rosa, 2000; Pollatsek et al, 1999; Sears, Campbell, & Lupker, 2006; Sears, Hino, & Lupker, 1995; for an additional review, see Mathey, 2001). Similar results were found for naming (Peereman & Content, 1995; Sears et al, 1995) and semantic categorization tasks (Carreiras et al, 1997; Forster & Shen, 1996).…”

Ice Is Hot and Water Is Dry

“…An exception to this validity argument is the finding that the existence of many orthographic neighbors did not decrease but increased item difficulty. A possible explanation for this finding could be that, in general, many orthographic neighbors facilitate orthographic comparison processes, as would be assumed by prior research (e.g., Huntsman & Lima, 2002), but only if the words are real words; if presented as a pseudoword, however, they may impede the decision of whether the word is a real word. Thus, the number of orthographic neighbors might interact with the item feature real word/ pseudoword.…”

“…Besides right/wrong, we systematically varied word rareness and the number of orthographic neighbors like in ProDi-L. The infrequency of words and a low number of orthographic neighbors should impair orthographic comparison processes and increase item difficulty and response latency (e.g., Fitzgerald et al, 2015; Huntsman & Lima, 2002). As a third feature, we varied the number of syllables.…”

Constructing Pseudowords with Constraints on Morphological Features - Application for Polish Pseudonouns and Pseudoverbs

“…In the case of pseudoword-based auditory stimuli, their phonological similarity to real words is of greater importance, while for pseudoword-based visual stimuli, their orthographic similarity to real words should be of primary consideration. For example, orthographic similarity affects the speed of recognition of pseudowords; a high number of orthographic neighbors leads to faster responses (Huntsman & Lima, 2002 ).…”