Orthographic and Phonological Neighborhoods in Naming: Not All Neighbors Are Equally Influential in Orthographic Space

Abstract

The neighborhood size effect refers to the finding that single word naming is faster for stimuli that are orthographically similar to numerous lexical entries. We explored the nature of this phenomenon in five experiments with French pseudowords and words, and we examined the orthographic and the phonological characteristics of neighbors through quantitative analyses of a word corpus. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the facilitatory effect of neighborhood size was determined by a subset of neighbors, calledphonographicneighbors, which are also phonologically similar to the target letter string. Experiments 3 to 5 aimed at assessing the influence of phonographic neighbors as a function of the constituents shared with the target. The results suggested that the number of neighbors sharing the target rime determines the facilitation effect. The findings are discussed in relation to the structure of the French orthography and its characteristics in comparison with English. We conclude that the joined orthographic and phonological similarity between lexical neighbors and the target letter string determines the facilitation effect observed in naming.