title: Neighborhood effects in visual word recognition: effects of letter delay and nonword context difficulty.
abstract: The role of a target's orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition was investigated in 2 lexical decision experiments. In both experiments, some stimuli had 1 letter delayed relative to the presentation of the rest of the stimulus. Experiment 1 showed that delaying a letter position, which yielded a potentially competitive neighbor, was more costly to target recognition than delaying a position that yielded no neighbors. This effect was strongest when one of these neighbors was of higher frequency than the target itself. Additionally, the effect was reduced for words with a high friendly-to-unfriendly-neighbor ratio (friendly neighbors being those words containing the delayed letter). In Experiment 2 the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination was manipulated by varying the density of the nonwords' neighborhoods. Only when the nonwords had many neighbors at several positions did the word responses show neighborhood competition effects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Dartmouth College, New Haven, Connecticut.
authors.forename: K R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Pugh
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Rexer
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Peter
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Katz
mesh_terms: D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation