Abstract
This paper reviews recent research on the effects of orthographic neighbors on visual word recognition in order to resolve apparently contradictory findings. The review reveals that the empirical evidence is not as contradictory as has been claimed. Neighbors have consistently been reported to facilitate responses to words in naming and lexical decision tasks. Inhibitory effects of neighbors appear to arise from sophisticated guessing strategies in the perceptual identification task or lexical decision strategies adopted in unusual stimulus environments. For English words, there is minimal evidence of competitive influences on lexical retrieval due to higher frequency neighbors. Such effects are more common in such languages as French and Spanish, perhaps because they embody a more consistent relationship between orthography and phonology. These findings provide important constraints on assumptions about the form of lexical representations and the parallel activation mechanisms assumed to underlie lexical retrieval.
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This review was prepared with support from Australian Research Council Grant AC9231195. I am grateful to Ken Forster for organizing the Cognitive Science Lexical Processing Workshop at the University of Arizona in November 1995, for which I initially prepared this review. My thanks are extended to Colin Davis for helping to collate the neighborhood statistics for the CELEX database.
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Andrews, S. The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4, 439–461 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214334
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214334