Neighborhood Effects on Nonword Visual Processing in a Language with Shallow Orthography

Authors: Arduino L.S.¹; Burani C.²

Source: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Volume 33, Number 1, January 2004 , pp. 75-95(21)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of neighborhood size and no neighborhood size × neighborhood frequency interaction were found. In Experiment 2, a facilitatory effect of neighborhood size on nonword naming was shown: Naming latencies were faster when nonwords had a large neighborhood. In the naming experiment, there was no effect of neighbors' frequency and no neighborhood size × neighborhood frequency interaction. An additional role for bigram frequency was found whereas syllable frequency did not give any independent contribution. These results further corroborate the view that, in a language with transparent orthography like Italian, despite a substantial contribution of sublexical print-to-sound mapping due to the language's high regularity/consistency, reading aloud of nonlexical material may benefit from the contribution of the lexical component.

Keywords: Bigram frequency; neighborhood frequency; nonword processing; orthographic neighborhood size; reading aloud

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:JOPR.0000010515.58435.68

Affiliations: 1: Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy. University of Urbino, Italy., Email: lisa.arduino@uniurb.it 2: Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy

Publication date: 2004-01-01