Phonological neighbors speed visual word processing: evidence from multiple tasks.

The author investigated the role of phonological neighborhood on visual word recognition. Using a lexical decision task, the author showed in Experiment 1 that words with large phonological neighborhoods were processed more rapidly than those with smaller phonological neighborhoods. This facilitative effect was obtained even when the nonword fillers had the same number of phonological neighbors as the words. This finding indicates that phonological neighbors speed processing within the phonological system. In the next 2 experiments, this claim was further tested using the naming and semantic categorization tasks. In both experiments, the effect of phonological neighborhood was found to be facilitative. The results across all 3 experiments indicate that phonology is central to visual word recognition and that phonological neighborhood provides a reliable measure of phonological processing.

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