Orthographic neighborhood structure and lexical access

Abstract

An experiment addressed whether lexical decision response latency and error rate are influenced by orthographic neighborhood structure. It was found that words with several higher-frequency neighbors were responded to more slowly and less accurately than words with fewer higher-frequency neighbors, even though the stimulus words were matched oh number of neighbors, word frequency, neighborhood frequency, number of higher-frequency neighbors, word length, and number of syllables. The results indicate that frequency is a relative effect dependent on the structure of the neighborhood. A word at the “bottom” of its neighborhood will be affected by the lexical representations of its higher-frequency neighbors. However, a word at the “top” of its neighborhood does not appear to be affected by the lexical representations of its neighbors.