Positional neighborhood effects on spoken word recognition

Abstract

Previous work has shown that the composition of similarity neighborhoods has demonstrable effects on spoken word recognition. In a reanalysis of previously collected data of word identification and lexical decision, the effects of similarity neighborhoods on spoken word recognition were further explored by asking two specific questions. (1) Do neighbors at each phoneme position within a spoken word have equivalent effects on word recognition? (2) Is average neighborhood frequency or the highest neighborhood frequency the superior predictor of recognition performance? Our results show that the number of neighbors defined on the basis of initial phoneme substitution affects word recognition more than the neighbors at other phoneme positions. And, it is found that the word with the maximum frequency in a neighborhood is as good a predictor of recognition performance as the average neighborhood frequency. The implications of these findings for theories of spoken word recognition will be discussed.