title: No enemies in the neighborhood: absence of inhibitory neighborhood effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization.
abstract: The effect of neighborhood density on visual word recognition was found to be facilitatory for words but inhibitory for nonwords in 3 lexical-decision experiments. However, the facilitation virtually disappeared when the task was changed to semantic categorization (animal vs. nonanimal), despite the presence of a strong frequency effect. None of these experiments showed a consistent inhibitory effect of a higher frequency neighbor. The absence of inhibitory effects suggests that competition does not play a key role in visual word recognition. The data also suggest that the neighborhood density effect is not an access effect but is a task-dependent effect instead.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, USA. kforster@u.arizona.edu
authors.forename: K I
authors.initials: KI
authors.lastname: Forster
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning