What are the effects of a word's orthographic neighborhood on the word recognition process? Andrews (1989) reported that large neighborhoods facilitate lexical access (the neighborhood size effect). Grainger, O'Regan, Jacobs, & Segui (1989) reported that higher frequency neighbors inhibit lexical access (the "neighborhood frequency effect"). Because neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency typically covary (words with large neighborhoods will usually possess higher frequency neighbors), these findings would seem to contradict one another. In the present study, 6 experiments on the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency indicated that, at least for low-frequency words, large neighborhoods do facilitate processing. However, the existence of higher frequency neighbors seems to facilitate rather than inhibit processing. The implications of these findings for serial and parallel models of lexical access are discussed. Much of the research on visual word recognition has focused on the issue of lexical access. Consequently, a number of models of the lexical access process have been proposed, each providing a slightly different account of the various factors that affect this process. Consider, for example, the factor that is probably the most studied in this literature-printed-word frequency. The standard finding is that high-frequency words are processed faster than lowfrequency words. In Forster's (1976) serial search model, this effect is explained in terms of a serial-search process. According to the model, the entries in the lexicon are organized according to word frequency. The search for a match between the sensory input and the correct lexical entry proceeds in a serial manner, starting with the closest matching higher frequency entries. Thus, high-frequency words are identified more quickly than low-frequency words by virtue of their order in the search set. Alternatively, in "activation-based" models, such as McClelland and Rumelhart's (1981) interactive-activation model, frequency effects are attributed to the higher resting activation

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In this article, ambiguity and synonymy effects were examined in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks. Whereas the typical ambiguity advantage was observed in lexical decision and naming, an ambiguity disadvantage was observed in semantic categorization. In addition, a synonymy effect (slower latencies for words with many synonyms than for words with few synonyms) was observed in lexical decision and naming but not in semantic categorization. These results suggest that (a) an ambiguity disadvantage arises only when a task requires semantic processing, (b) the ambiguity advantage and the synonymy disadvantage in lexical decision and naming are due to semantic feedback, and (c) these effects are determined by the nature of the feedback relationships from semantics to orthography and phonology.

The effects of word frequency were examined for Japanese Kanji and Katakana words in 6 experiments. The sizes of frequency effects were comparable for Kanji and Katakana words in the standard lexical decision task. In the standard naming task, the frequency effect for Katakana words was significantly smaller than that for Kanji words. These results were consistent with the lexical-selection account of frequency effects offered by dual-route models. Contrary to this account, however, frequency effects were smaller for Katakana words than for Kanji words in go/no-go naming tasks, in which participants were asked to name a stimulus aloud only if it was a word. This Frequency × Script Type interaction was not the result of using a go/no-go task because the interaction disappeared in the go/no-go lexical decision task. These results pose a strong challenge for the lexical-selection account of frequency effects offered by dual-route models. The word frequency effect, that is, the finding that high-frequency words are responded to faster than lowfrequency words, is one of the most robust and well-known effects in word recognition research (e.g.

An ambiguity disadvantage (slower responses for ambiguous words, e.g., bank, than for unambiguous words) has been reported in semantic tasks (

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