Phonological Neighborhood Research Articles

Scaling up: How computational models can propel bilingualism research forward

The Multilink model that Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte, and Rekké (2018) present is an excellent example that connects empirical patterns obtained from behavioral studies with mechanisms that can be implemented in computational models. We have previously argued that implementation of computational models is important because it forces the researchers to be explicit about assumptions and to specify parameters and variables that may be absent in verbal models. The Multilink model, along with BIA/BIA+ and many other models, provides concrete hypotheses regarding the role of variables such as word frequency, word length, orthographic similarity, and phonological neighborhood for researchers to test and verify against empirical data (see examples in the special issue on computational modeling published in this journal; Li, 2013).

A quantitative analysis of phonological neighborhood networks in English and Korean

A quantitative analysis of phonological neighborhood networks in English and Korean

An electrophysiological megastudy of spoken word recognition

ABSTRACTThis study used electrophysiological recordings to a large sample of spoken words to track the time-course of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, concreteness and stimulus duration effects in two experiments. Fifty subjects were presented more than a thousand spoken words during either a go/no go lexical decision task (Experiment 1) or a go/no go semantic categorisation task (Experiment 2) while EEG was collected. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyze the data. Effects of word frequency were found on the N400 and also as early as 100 ms in Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2. Phonological neighbourhood density produced an early effect around 250 ms and the typical N400 effect. Concreteness elicited effects in later epochs on the N400. Stimulus duration affected all epochs and its influence reflected changes in the timing of the ERP components. Overall the results support cascaded interactive models of spoken word recognition.

The time course of word recognition in younger and older adults: Signal degradation and lexical challenge

As listeners age, speech recognition often becomes more challenging, especially in noisy environments. Older adults also appear to have more difficulty resolving lexical competition than do younger adults. Relatively little is known, however, about how such signal- and lexicon-related challenges interact to affect the timing of word recognition and how such effects might change across the lifespan. In this study, we use a visual world paradigm to investigate the effects noise, word frequency, and phonological neighborhood density on the time course of spoken word recognition in young and older adults. On each trial, listeners saw four items on a computer screen and heard “Click on the” followed by a target word that corresponded to one of the images. None of the other items on the display were phonologically or semantically related to the target. Eye-tracking results show that the time course of word recognition is predicted by age, noise, frequency, density, and several of their interactions. In general, high-frequency words and words from dense phonological neighborhoods were fixated more quickly, while noise and age slowed recognition. These results support a framework in which lexical and acoustic factors co-determine the cognitive challenges associated with speech perception.As listeners age, speech recognition often becomes more challenging, especially in noisy environments. Older adults also appear to have more difficulty resolving lexical competition than do younger adults. Relatively little is known, however, about how such signal- and lexicon-related challenges interact to affect the timing of word recognition and how such effects might change across the lifespan. In this study, we use a visual world paradigm to investigate the effects noise, word frequency, and phonological neighborhood density on the time course of spoken word recognition in young and older adults. On each trial, listeners saw four items on a computer screen and heard “Click on the” followed by a target word that corresponded to one of the images. None of the other items on the display were phonologically or semantically related to the target. Eye-tracking results show that the time course of word recognition is predicted by age, noise, frequency, density, and several of their interactions. In general,...

The effect of lexical competition on vowel duration before voiced and voiceless English stops

One source of phonetic variation is lexical competition, which has been shown to cause both hyperarticulation, especially of vowel formants (e.g., Wright 2004), and reduction, manifested as shorter segment and word durations (Kilanski 2009, Gahl et al. 2012). Studies have found that lexical competition (e.g., having a minimal pair competitor, having more phonological neighbors) causes contrastive hyperarticulation of the initial stop voicing contrast in English: greater competition makes VOT longer for voiceless stops and/or shorter for voiced stops (Baese-Berk & Goldrick 2009, Nelson & Wedel 2017). I conducted a corpus study that looked for contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast in English. The cue examined was preceding vowel duration. I did not find contrastive hyperarticulation: neither minimal pair competitor existence nor higher neighborhood density caused vowels to be longer before final [d] or shorter before final [t]. Instead, both competition metrics correlated with shorter vowel durations before [t] and [d]. This result is consistent with Goldrick et al. (2013)’s failure to find contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast and their hypothesis that competition affects initial and final contrasts differently. It is also consistent with Gahl et al’s (2012) finding that high neighborhood density causes reduction.

Asymmetric Cross-language Activation of Translations in Korean-English Bilinguals

This study tested the predictions of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model through a translation recognition task in which low-intermediate Korean-English bilinguals decided whether the second word of a two-word sequence was the correct translation of the first. In the critical distractor conditions, the second word was not a correct translation of the first, but phonologically related to the first word (i.e., phonological neighbors), or phonologically related to the correct translation (i.e., translation neighbors). Results showed that the participants experienced interference for related distractors in both L2-L1 and L1-L2 translation directions. However, an interaction with distractor type was only found in the forward (L1 to L2) translation direction, with a larger interference effect for the translation neighbors. The results of the present study support and extend the predictions of the BIA+ model by showing nonselective phonological activation for different-script bilinguals, while also supporting the predictions of the RHM regarding translation asymmetry. We suggest previous assumptions regarding the mechanisms of the translation recognition task and interpretation of its data may be flawed, and propose a fundamental rethinking of these issues.

Orthographic influence on spoken word identification: Behavioral and fMRI evidence

The current study investigated behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for orthographic influences on auditory word identification. To assess such influences, the proportion of similar sounding words (i.e. phonological neighbors) that were also spelled similarly (i.e., orthographic neighbors) was computed for each auditorily presented word as the Orthographic-to-Phonological Overlap Ratio (OPOR). Speech intelligibility was manipulated by presenting monosyllabic words in multi-talker babble at two signal-to-noise ratios: + 3 and + 10 dB SNR. Identification rates were lower for high overlap words in the challenging + 3 dB SNR condition. In addition, BOLD contrast increased with OPOR at the more difficult SNR, and decreased with OPOR under more favorable SNR conditions. Both voxel-based and region of interest analyses demonstrated robust effects of OPOR in several cingulo-opercular regions. However, contrary to prior theoretical accounts, no task-related activity was observed in posterior regions associated with phonological or orthographic processing. We suggest that, when processing is difficult, orthographic-to-phonological feature overlap increases the availability of competing responses, which then requires additional support from domain general performance systems in order to produce a single response.

Relationship between word properties of fluency tasks at baseline and treatment outcomes in Primary Progressive Aphasia

Relationship between word properties of fluency tasks at baseline and treatment outcomes in Primary Progressive Aphasia

Phonological Neighbourhood Density in Russian Word Production: Evidence from Children and Adults

Phonological neighbourhood density (PND) refers to the number of words which can be formed from a given word by substituting, adding or deleting one phoneme. Thus, word with many similar sounding neighbours has a dense neighbourhood, whereas a word with few neighbours or without neighbors has a sparse neighbourhood. Previous studies have shown that dense and sparse neighbourhoods influence word production in different ways. Research in English-speaking adults demonstrated that words with dense neighbourhood are produced faster than words with sparse neighbourhood, facilitating lexical access. At the same time, sparse neighbourhood inhibits word production. Interestingly, studies in Spanish adults showed the reverse effect: dense neighbourhood inhibits word production whereas sparse neighbourhood facilitates it. This cross-linguistic difference in the PND pattern was explained in terms of morphological complexity of Spanish in comparison to English. Although there are numerous studies of the PND effect in adults, some questions remain unknown. For example, how does PND influence word production in morphologically more complex language than Spanish? Or, how does the PND pattern develop in children? The present paper aims to explore these questions.

Understanding Bilingual Word Learning: The Role of Phonotactic Probability and Phonological Neighborhood Density.

Previous research has shown that the language-learning mechanism is affected by bilingualism resulting in a novel word learning advantage for bilingual speakers. However, less is known about the factors that might influence this advantage. This article reports an investigation of 2 factors: phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density. Acquisition of 15 novel words varying in phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density was examined in high-proficiency, early onset, Mandarin-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Both bilinguals and monolinguals demonstrated a significant effect of phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density. Novel word learning improved when the phonological neighborhood density was higher; in contrast, higher phonotactic probability resulted in worse learning. Although the bilingual speakers showed significantly better novel word learning than monolingual speakers, this did not interact with phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density manipulations. Both bilingual and monolingual word learning abilities are constrained by the same learning mechanisms. However, bilingual advantages may be underpinned by more effective allocation of cognitive resources due to their dual language experience.

StimulStat: A lexical database for Russian.

In this article, we present StimulStat - a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, including frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic and phonological neighborhood frequency and size, grammatical ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from various dictionaries and are presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others were computed specifically for the database. The database can be accessed freely at http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru .

Auditory word recognition of verbs: Effects of verb argument structure on referent identification.

Word recognition includes the activation of a range of syntactic and semantic knowledge that is relevant to language interpretation and reference. Here we explored whether or not the number of arguments a verb takes impinges negatively on verb processing time. In this study, three experiments compared the dynamics of spoken word recognition for verbs with different preferred argument structure. Listeners’ eye movements were recorded as they searched an array of pictures in response to hearing a verb. Results were similar in all the experiments. The time to identify the referent increased as a function of the number of arguments, above and beyond any effects of label appropriateness (and other controlled variables, such as letter, phoneme and syllable length, phonological neighborhood, oral and written lexical frequencies, imageability and rated age of acquisition). The findings indicate that the number of arguments a verb takes, influences referent identification during spoken word recognition. Representational complexity and amount of information generated by the lexical item that aids target identification are discussed as possible sources of this finding.

The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology.

Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns were not compatible with the systematic substitution of target forms by either (a) the most frequent form of that noun or (b) a single morphosyntactic default form, as might be predicted by naive versions of a constructivist and generativist account, respectively. Rather, most errors reflected near-miss substitutions of singular for plural, masculine for feminine, or nominative/accusative for a less frequent case. Together, these findings provide support for an input-based approach to morphological acquisition, but are not adequately explained by any single account in its current form.

Orthographic and phonological neighborhood databases across multiple languages

The increased globalization of science and technology and the growing number of bilinguals and multilinguals in the world have made research with multiple languages a mainstay for scholars who study human function and especially those who focus on language, cognition, and the brain. Such research can benefit from large-scale databases and online resources that describe and measure lexical, phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. The present paper discusses currently-available resources and underscores the need for tools that enable measurements both within and across multiple languages. A general review of language databases is followed by a targeted introduction to databases of orthographic and phonological neighborhoods. A specific focus on CLEARPOND illustrates how databases can be used to assess and compare neighborhood information across languages, to develop research materials, and to provide insight into broad questions about language. As an example of how using large-scale databases can answer questions about language, a closer look at neighborhood effects on lexical access reveals that not only orthographic, but also phonological neighborhoods can influence visual lexical access both within and across languages. We conclude that capitalizing upon large-scale linguistic databases can advance, refine, and accelerate scientific discoveries about the human linguistic capacity.

Phonological neighborhood density and intra-speaker variation in vowel production

Words’ phonetic characteristics are affected by numerous lexical factors. Wright (2004) showed that words’ phonological neighborhood density (PND) affects the production of vowels. Vowels in words with high PND are hyperarticulated relative to the same vowels in low-PND words. Wright interpreted this as evidence that speech production accommodates listeners’ presumed needs: high-PND words are hyper-articulated because they are generally harder to perceive than low-PND words (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998). This effect has been the subject of numerous recent studies, including ones by Munson and Solomon (2004) and Munson (2013) that replicated the effect, and ones by Buz and Jaeger (2016) and Gahl, Yao, and Johnson (2012) that did not. One possible explanation for Wright’s original effect is that the ease with which low-density words are perceived allows speakers more freedom to produce the sounds in them variably, including under-articulating them. If this is true, then we would predict that the acoustic characteristics of low-PND words would show more trial-to-trial variability than those of high-PND words. To examine this, we recorded 19 speakers saying 10 repetitions each of high- and low-PND CVC words. The F1 and F2 frequencies of the vowels were measured. For each token, the distance from the center of each speaker’s F1/F2 space was computed. The coefficient of variation for this measure was higher (i.e., more variable) for low-PND words than for high-PND words, t[18]=−2.80, p = 0.011.

Phonological neighborhood density and speech production in L1 and L2 English speakers

Phonological Neighborhood Density (PND) affects speech production latencies, word durations, and acoustic-phonetic detail (e.g., Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009; Buz & Jaeger, 2016; Fox, Reilly, & Blumstein, 2015; Munson, 2013; Munson & Solomon, 2004; Wright, 2004). The nature of these effects has been debated actively. Some have argued that these effects reflect intentional articulatory modifications to increase intelligibility, while others have suggested that they are the consequence of planning processes. The purpose of this presentation is to examine whether these effects are present in second-language speakers of English whose first language is Korean. Because the mechanisms underlying these effects are unclear, examining whether non-native speakers also show sensitivity to PND will inform our understanding of the mechanisms that drive them. Moreover, studying non-native speakers of varying proficiency allows us to infer whether PND-driven variation in production emerges over the course of second-language acquisition. The production of multiple repetitions of high- and low-PND CVC words was collected from 17 native adult speakers of English and 19 adult L2 speakers of English whose L1 was Korean. Estimates of vocabulary size were also collected for both groups. Analyses of production latencies and vowel acoustics are ongoing. [Funding provided by a University of Minnesota Multicultural Summer Research Opportunity Program award to the first author.]

A new test for exemplar theory: Varying versus non-varying words in Spanish

We used a Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm to compare Spanish words in which the phonetic realization of /s/ can vary (word-medial positions: bu[s]to ~ bu[h]to ‘chest’, word-final positions: remo[s] ~ remo[h] ‘oars’) to words in which it cannot (word-initial positions: [s]opa ~ *[h]opa ‘soup’). At study, participants listened to lists of nine words that were phonological neighbors of an unheard critical item (e.g., popa, sepa, soja, etc. for the critical item sopa). At test, participants performed free recall and yes/no recognition tasks. Replicating previous work in this paradigm, results showed robust false memory effects: that is, participants were more likely to (falsely) remember a critical item than a random intrusion. When the realization of /s/ was consistent across conditions (Experiment 1), false memory rates for varying versus non-varying words did not significantly differ. However, when the realization of /s/ varied between [s] and [h] in those positions which allow it (Experiment 2), false recognition rates for varying words like busto were significantly higher than those for non-varying words like sopa. Assuming that higher false memory rates are indicative of greater lexical activation, we interpret these results to support the predictions of exemplar theory, which claims that words with heterogeneous versus homogeneous acoustic realizations should exhibit distinct patterns of activation.

False memories for morphologically simple versus complex words in English

Abstract In tasks such as lexical decision, people respond differently to morphologically complex words compared to morphologically simple ones (e.g. in English, lies vs. rise). These divergent responses could conceivably arise from differences in activation levels, or alternatively, from the additional steps required to decompose complex words. To investigate this issue, we used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm, which probes activation of lexical representations by measuring the probability of recalling or recognizing a word (such as lies) after listening to a list of its phonological neighbors (such as wise, lose, lime, etc.). Our results showed a significant false memory effect for complex words, which demonstrates that similar-sounding words can activate representations for stem-plus-affix combinations. Our results also showed no significant difference between false memory rates for complex versus simple words, which suggests that complex stem-plus-affix representations activate at levels equivalent to those of simple stem representations. These findings indicate that differences in activation level probably do not lie at the source of divergent responses to complex and simple words, and that decomposition is the more likely origin.

What is in the neighborhood of a tonal syllable? Evidence from auditory lexical decision in Mandarin Chinese

Phonological neighborhood effects have been found in spoken word recognition, word production and phonetic variation (Gahl, Yao, & Johnson, 2012; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Vitevitch, 2002). Overall, words from dense neighborhoods are harder to recognize but easier to produce. However, most previous studies have focused on English, while evidence suggests that these effects may not generalize cross-linguistically due to language-specific configurations of the lexicon (Michael S Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006, 2009). In the current study, we investigate the effects of phonological neighborhoods in Mandarin Chinese, which has a vastly different lexicon structure from that of English. Results from an auditory lexical decision experiment showed that phonological neighborhood density and neighbor frequency (defined by the one-phoneme/tone difference rule) are predictive of the speed and accuracy of lexical decision. Homophone density also has a facilitative effect on the accuracy of lexical decision. The implications of the current findings are discussed in the framework of the lexicon model proposed by Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (1994, 2009).

Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities

Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible.