Neighbors in the lexicon: Friends or foes?

Auditory word identification in dyslexic and normally achieving readers

“…On this view, it must be the case that the adult participants do not have fully segmental representations for words in sparse neighborhoods because adults, as well as children, required more gates to recognize these words. The finding that neighborhood density is facilitative rather than competitive for word recognition runs contrary to the pattern established for other word recognition tasks and is perhaps surprising in terms of models of lexical competition (e.g., Dell & Gordon, 2003). Currently, it appears that the interpretation of neighborhood effects in gating tasks requires further scrutiny.…”

A case-series test of the interactive two-step model of lexical access: Evidence from picture naming☆

“…If the task is word production, however, targets in dense neighborhoods are retrieved more accurately and rapidly, the opposite of what occurs during recognition (Gordon, 2002;Vitevitch, 2002). Our modelÕs interactive assumption provides a possible explanation for the effects in production (Dell & Gordon, 2003). During both word and phonological retrieval, lexical units for phonological neighbors become active because of phonological-toword feedback.…”

Capacity demands of phoneme selection in word production: New evidence from dual-task experiments.

“…However, effects arising at other processing levels may have contributed to the observed latency differences. If there are bidirectional links between phonemes and superordinate units, as, for instance, proposed by Dell (1986;Dell & Gordon, 2003; see also Vitevitch, 2002), then activation of some of the target phonemes by a related distractor will lead to additional activation of the phonological word form of the target. Therefore, word form selection may be facilitated as well as phoneme selection.…”