Sounds of the neighborhood: False memories and the structure of the phonological lexicon

The development of a well-formulated view of the memory storage systems (lexicons) involved in word recognition is a central goal of research on language processes. Assumptions about the organizing characteristics and structures of these memory systems are found in various discussions of lexical neighborhoods (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977) or cohorts (Johnson & Pugh, 1994; Marslen-Wilson, 1990). The focus of neighborhood research in visual word recognition has been primarily at the orthographic level. Several articles have discussed how orthographic neighborhood effects provide insight into the manner by which visual words are translated into sound and meaning during reading. In this article, we move the investigation to the phonological lexicon in an attempt to establish the word characteristics that best reflect phonological lexical organization. We describe two phonological false memory experiments that demonstrate that the initial two phonemes of phonological CVC words play a central role in predicting false memories for unpresented items. We also provide evidence of sustained and complementary activation when lists of items provide converging information about the unpresented critical lure.