Neighborhood effects in auditory word recognition: Phonological competition and orthographic facilitation

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Abstract

The present study investigated phonological and orthographic neighborhood effects in auditory word recognition in French. In an auditory lexical decision task, phonological neighborhood (PN) produced the standard inhibitory effect (words with many neighbors produced longer latencies and more errors than words with few neighbors). In contrast, orthographic neighborhood (ON) produced a facilitatory effect. In Experiment 2, the facilitatory ON effect was replicated while controlling for phonotactic probability, a variable that has previously been shown to produce facilitatory effects. In Experiment 3, the results were replicated in a shadowing task, ruling out the possibility that the ON effect results from a strategic and task-specific mechanism that might operate in the lexical decision task. It is argued that the PN effect reflects lexical competition between similar sounding words while the ON effect reflects the consistency of the sublexical mapping between phonology and orthography. The results join an accumulating number of studies suggesting that orthographic information influences auditory word recognition.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-two undergraduate psychology students at the University of Provence participated in the study for course credit. All were native French speakers, with no reported history of speech or hearing disorders.

Stimuli and design

The experimental design resulted from an orthogonal manipulation of ON (small vs. large) and PN (small vs. large). PN is typically assessed by counting the number of words that can be obtained by changing, adding, or deleting a single phoneme (e.g., Luce & Pisoni, 1998). On the other hand,

Experiment 2

The finding that structural density can produce both facilitation and inhibition has been reported previously (e.g., Metsala, 1997; Pitt & Samuel, 1995; Storkel & Morisette, 2002). Most prominently, Vitevitch and Luce, 1998, Vitevitch and Luce, 1999 observed that neighborhood density had a facilitatory effect on nonword processing but an inhibitory effect on word processing. They explained this duality with the fact that neighborhood density is highly correlated with phonotactic probability, a

Experiments 3A and 3B

The aim of the present experiment was to find out whether the ON effect would persist in a task, in which a read-out mechanism based on global orthographic activation was unlikely to operate. Thus, we replicated Experiments 1 and 2 using a shadowing task. In a shadowing task, participants are simply asked to name aloud a previously presented target word. Finding an ON effect in the shadowing task would not only put the task-specific strategy explanation to rest but it would also support the

General discussion

In the present article, we investigated the role of orthographic and phonological neighbors in auditory lexical decision and shadowing tasks. The lexical decision results of Experiment 1 show inhibition of PN and facilitation of ON. That is, phonological neighbors hurt whereas orthographic neighbors help spoken word recognition. Because previous experiments found facilitatory effects in auditory word recognition due to sublexical facilitation coming from phonotactic constraints (Jusczyk et al.,

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marielle Lange and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Special thank to Mike Vitevitch for his help with the computations of probabilistic phonotactics.

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