In previous studies in English examining the influence of phonological neighbourhood density in spoken word production, words with many similar sounding words, or a dense neighbourhood, were produced more quickly and accurately than words with few similar sounding words, or a sparse neighbourhood. The influence of phonological neighbourhood density on the process of spoken word production in Spanish was examined with a picture-naming task. The results showed that pictures with Spanish names from sparse neighbourhoods were named more quickly than pictures with Spanish names from dense neighbourhoods. The present pattern of results is the opposite of what has been previously found in speech production in English. We hypothesise that differences in the morphology of Spanish and English and/or the location in the word where phonological neighbours tend to occur may contribute to the processing differences observed in the two languages.

Neighborhood density—the number of words that sound similar to a given word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998)—influences word-learning in native English speaking children and adults (Storkel, 2004; Storkel, Armbruster, & Hogan, 2006): novel words with many similar sounding English words (i.e., dense neighborhood) are learned more quickly than novel words with few similar sounding English words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). The present study examined how neighborhood density influences word-learning in native English speaking adults learning Spanish as a foreign language. Students in their third-semester of Spanish language classes learned advanced Spanish words that sounded similar to many known Spanish words (i.e., dense neighborhood) or sounded similar to few known Spanish words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). In three word-learning tasks, performance was better for Spanish words with dense rather than sparse neighborhoods. These results suggest that a similar mechanism may be used to learn new words in a native and a foreign language.

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on longer words, bisyllabic words varying in neighborhood density were presented auditorily to participants in a perceptual identification task and a lexical decision task. In the perceptual identification task, words with sparse neighborhoods were more accurately identified than words with dense neighborhoods. In the lexical decision task, words with sparse neighborhoods were responded to more quickly and more accurately than words with dense neighborhoods. These results are similar to those found in studies examining the influence of neighborhood density on the recognition of monosyllabic words in English. In order to better understand lexical processing, models of spoken word recognition must account for the processing of words of all types.

A number of resources provide psycholinguistic researchers with information about the words that the typical child or adult knows in a variety of languages. What is currently not available is a resource that provides information about the words that a typical adult learning a foreign language knows. We created such a resource for Spanish: The Beginning Spanish Lexicon. The present report describes the words contained in this web-accessible resource, and the information about those words provided by the interface. This information is freely accessible at: http://www.people.ku.edu/~mvitevit/BegSpanLex.html

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