Lexical competition in spoken word recognition by younger and older adults: A comparison of the rime cognate, neighborhood, and cohort

Abstract

A central issue in research on spoken word recognition has been to specify the lexical candidates that are initially activated and compete during lexical discrimination. Amano [J. Mem. Lang. (submitted)] has recently proposed a new candidate set, the rime cognate (RC), which suggests that the set of potential lexical candidates consists of all items containing the same phoneme sequence as the rime (vowel nucleus plus coda) of that word. The present study was designed to compare the ability of the RC and two other sets, the neighborhood and cohort, to account for spoken word recognition in both younger and older adults. Density measures derived from the neighborhood were significantly correlated with identification scores for younger and older subjects. In contrast, RC density metrics were significantly correlated with identification scores only for older adults. Both neighborhood and RC density measures accounted for a greater percentage of the variance in spoken word recognition for older than for younger listeners. Metrics derived from the cohort were not significantly correlated with identification scores for either younger or older adults. The implications of these findings for several current models of spoken word recognition are discussed. [Work supported by the Brookdale foundation.]