Chapter 7 Orthographic Neighborhoods and Visual Word Recognition

Abstract

This chapter reviews some recent experimental work on visual word recognition in such languages (Dutch, English and French), where researchers have attempted to evaluate the role of similarity neighborhoods in the word recognition process. Written words are similar to other words in many different ways: visually (for example, try-fog); orthographically (for example, foe-fog); phonologically (for example, fought-fog); and semantically (for example, mist-fog). The research presented in the chapter is centered on orthographic neighborhoods among words in languages where this particular similarity relationship is often partially confounded with both visual and phonological similarity. At the theoretical level, the research presented supports a view of visual word recognition as a process in which incoming sensory information defines a set of lexical candidates that then compete with each other for identification. The recognition process can, according to this point of view, be (artificially) divided into two stages: (1) sensory information is mapped onto the stored representations of words in memory; and (2) one lexical representation is selected as the best candidate for identification. The principal goal of any model of visual word recognition should be to provide a formal description of the processes underlying these two basic operations.