Neighborhood Effects

Abstract

The organization of lexical knowledge at the phonological level has long been thought to incorporate some encoding of similarity neighborhoods: in the network structure of the lexicon, words that share phonological components are more closely connected to one another than words that are different. The notion of a “neighbor” as a similar word has provided tremendous insight into a variety of psycho‐linguistic phenomena related to spoken word recognition and spoken word production. The present chapter explores this notion of neighbor, focusing on the characterization of neighbors of a target word as the other words that are activated when that target is active. As we will see, this notion allows us to predict inhibitory or facilitatory effects depending on the task. These effects are well documented across tasks and participant populations. Following a brief description of the notion of the mental lexicon and competition in lexical access, we review research in spoken word recognition and production, and describe how the neighborhood construct (and similarity more generally) has been applied in phonologically based psycholinguistic research. We then examine how the notion of neighbor has been applied to domains such as language acquisition, language impairment, and other modalities of communication, including written language processing and audiovisual speech perception.