Effects of kana-level neighbors and phoneme-level neighbors on lexical decision of Japanese katakana words

Abstract

This study examined the effect of neighborhood size on the recognition of Japanese katakana words. Neighbors of a given katakana word were defined in two ways; kana-level neighbor is a katakana word that can be constructed by changing one letter of the target word preserving the other letter positions, and phoneme-level neighbor is a katakana word that can be created by changing one phoneme (consonant or vowel) preserving the other phoneme positions of the target. In Experiment 1, 30 university students participated in a lexical decision task and numbers of kana-level neighbor were manipulated. The result showed that the number of kana-level neighbor had an inhibitory effect on lexical decision of low familiarity katakana words. In Experiment 2, 30 university students participated in a lexical decision task and numbers of phoneme-level neighbor were manipulated. The result showed that the number of phoneme-level neighbor had no effect on lexical decision of katakana words. These results suggest that neighbors affect each other on their orthographic representation in the recognition of low familiarity Japanese katakana words.