The influence of phonological neighborhood on visual word perception

Sensitivity to Phonological Similarity Within and Across Languages

“…While this difference was statistically significant, it is noticeably smaller than differences between sparse and dense neighborhoods in other neighborhood-density studies (e.g., Garlock et al 2001;Vitevitch 2002;Yates et al 2004). The fact that accuracy results showed a phonological neighborhood effect in the current dataset speaks to the robustness of the phenomenon.…”

“…1) and were selected from the IMSI Master Clips electronic database and the Alta Vista search engine, or hand-drawn. To identify phonological neighbors of each target word, the German corpus of the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al 1995) was used, with an item coded as a phonological neighbor if it differed from the target by only one phoneme, and had the phonemes in the same positions (Grainger et al 2005;Yates et al 2004 Stimuli were grouped into two conditions, one condition included words with large phonological neighborhoods (3 or more phonological neighbors in German) and the other condition included words with small phonological neighborhoods (2 or fewer phonological neighbors in German). An example of a stimulus word with a large phonological neighborhood is the German word for roof, Dach / dax/, whose German phonological neighborhood includes…”

“…The degree of within-language phonological overlap was manipulated by varying phonological neighborhood density of the target word. A word's neighborhood size (a.k.a., neighborhood density) was defined as the number of other words that differed from the target word by a single phoneme (e.g., Grainger et al 2005;Yates et al 2004). Previous studies with monolinguals showed that phonological neighborhood density influences word production.…”

“…One of the factors found to have a particularly robust influence on language processing is how similar or different a word is to other words, for example, in terms of sound structure. Empirical evidence from studies with monolinguals suggests that a word's phonological similarity to other words influences its recognition in the visual modality (e.g., Dijkstra et al 1999;Ferrand and Grainger 1994;Perfetti and Bell 1991;Van Orden 1987;Van Orden et al 1988;Yates et al 2004), in the auditory modality (e.g., Garlock et al 2001;Luce and Pisoni 1998;Metsala 1997;Slowiaczek et al 2003;Vitevitch and Luce 1998;Ziegler et al 2003), and during production (e.g., Costa and Sebastian-Galles 1998;Harley 1984;Harley and Bown 1998;Vitevitch and Sommers 2003;James and Burke 2000;Meyer and Bock 1992;Vitevitch 1997Vitevitch , 2002). …”

Phonographic neighbors, not orthographic neighbors, determine word naming latencies

“…Moreover, like stone, stoat is a phonological neighbor of stove, but it is not its phonographic neighbor (since it is not an orthographic neighbor). Although Yates (2005) has found evidence for phonological neighborhood effects in naming, and Yates, Lawrence Locker, and Simpson (2004) have suggested that some orthographic neighborhood effects might be due to phonological neighborhood, no evidence has been adduced for the latter point beyond the existence of the confound between the variables. Phonographic neighbors (rather than simply phonological neighbors) are of concern in the present article, since it is these that should be the cause of neighborhood effects, according to the phonographic neighborhood hypothesis.…”