The effects of phonological neighborhood density in childhood word production and recognition in Russian are opposite to English

Abstract

This study investigates how phonological neighborhood density (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood inhibited production but facilitated recognition. Importantly, these effects are not universal because a reverse PND pattern was found in Spanish-speaking adults. Probably, PND effects depend on the morphological properties of language. This study focuses on PND effects in word production and recognition in terms of facilitation and inhibition in Russian. Our results are consistent with those in Spanish: Russian-speaking adults produced words with dense neighborhoods more slowly and recognized them faster than words with sparse neighborhoods. Russian children showed the same PND effect in recognition and no effect was found in production. The findings support the hypothesis that PND effects in word production and recognition are influenced by the morphological system of language.

A Russian Continuous Speech Recognition System Based on the DTW Algorithm under Artificial Intelligence

“…Combining and handling the relationship between teaching and scienti c research, it is still necessary to make e orts to transform into a "dual-teacher type." At the same time, Russian teachers should continue to enhance their own knowledge reserves, strengthen connections with other disciplines, and prepare for the challenges of the new era [5].…”

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization

“…When examining homophone neighborhood density, it can be seen that the individual tones were hyper-articulated with a longer duration and a later F0 turning point in syllables with high homophone neighborhood density. To understand the patterns, it may be necessary to employ several models from the literature, namely the Neighborhood Activation Model and the communication-based accounts (e.g., Luce, 1986 ; Goldinger et al, 1989 ; Vitevitch and Sommers, 2003 ; Baus et al, 2008 ; Taler et al, 2010 ; Chen and Mirman, 2012 ; Gahl and Strand, 2016 ; Yao and Sharma, 2017 ; Arutiunian and Lopukhina, 2020 ; Karimi and Diaz, 2020 ). A crucial assumption of the Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM) is that the activation and inhibition of the target words during speech processing.…”

Phonological neighborhood measures and multisyllabic word acquisition in children

“…For example, studies from inflectional languages that show a positive effect of neighborhood density use a distinct measure of acquisition that emphasizes learning the correct inflectional suffixes rather than whole words (e.g., Granlund et al, 2019). In word recognition, there is an even more complex pattern: English studies suggest a negative impact of neighborhood density, but in adults rather than children (Suárez et al, 2011;Vitevitch et al, 2008), while studies in inflectional languages show a positive impact of neighborhood density in both adults and children (Arutiunian & Lopukhina, 2020;Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006). It is unknown if these disparities represent a fundamental difference in mental processes between multisyllabic recognition and acquisition.…”

“…The effect of neighbors on word recognition shows a more complicated dependence on the inflectional status of the language than word acquisition. In inflectional languages, multisyllabic words from dense neighborhoods were recognized more quickly than words from sparse neighborhoods in both children and adults (Arutiunian & Lopukhina, 2020;Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006). In contrast, English words from dense neighborhoods are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words from sparse neighborhoods, both in adults and children (e.g., Garlock, Walley & Metsala, 2001), thus inverting the trend in acquisition.…”