Abstract
Orthographic neighborhood size (N size) effect in Chinese character naming has been studied in adults. In the present study, we aimed to explore the developmental characteristics of Chinese N size effect. One hundred and seventeen students (40 from the 3rd grade with mean age of 9 years; 40 from the 5th grade with mean age of 11 years; 37 from the 7th grade with mean age of 13 years) were recruited in the study. A naming task of Chinese characters was adopted to elucidate N-size- effect development. Reaction times and error rates were recorded. Results showed that children in the 3rd grade named characters from large neighborhoods faster than named those from small neighborhoods, revealing a facilitatory N size effect; the 5th graders showed null N size effect; while the 7th graders showed an inhibitory N size effect, with longer reaction times for the characters from large neighborhoods than for those from small neighborhoods. The change from facilitation to inhibition of neighborhood size effect across grades suggested the transition from broadly tuned to finely tuned lexical representation in reading development, and the possible inhibition from higher frequency neighbors for higher graders.
Highlights
Once a single word is presented, the readers may mentally activate many other forms, such as words with similar orthography
We aimed to explore the development of neighborhood size effect in Chinese character naming among the 3rd, 5th, and 7th graders, controlling the age of acquisition (AoA) of target characters to match the familiarity of stimuli across different grades
The present results based on the participant analysis showed a facilitatory neighborhood size (N size) effect for the 3rd graders, null effect for the 5th graders, and an inhibitory N size effect for the 7th graders
Summary
Once a single word is presented, the readers may mentally activate many other forms, such as words with similar orthography Coltheart and his colleagues first defined the concept of orthographic neighborhood of a target word as all words of the same length that can be generated by changing just one letter while preserving letter positions [1], e.g. orthographic neighbors of ‘‘cheat’’ are ‘‘cheap’’, ‘‘chest’’, ‘‘cleat’’, and ‘‘wheat’’. The number of these neighbors is called neighborhood size (N size). Many models of lexical processing can give good explanations to the N size effect, such as the dual route model [9], the parallel distributed processing model [10], and the multiple read-out model [11]
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