Word frequency and neighborhood frequency effects in lexical decision and naming

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that investigate the influence of a stimulus word's printed frequency and the frequencies of words orthographically similar to the stimulus (neighborhood frequency) on the processing of that word. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when neighborhood frequency is controlled, the effect of word frequency in the lexical decision task is reduced to a level comparable to the frequency effect obtained in the naming task. Neighborhood frequency was shown to have opposite effects in lexical decision and naming. Words with at least one higher frequency neighbors produced longer lexical decision latencies than words with no higher frequency neighbors, whereas naming latencies were slightly facilitated by increasing the number of higher frequency neighbors. In Experiment 2 both lexical decision and word naming responses were inhibited by the prior presentation of an orthographically similar word of lower frequency than the target. Current models of visual word recognition and naming are evaluated on the basis of these results.