title: An examination of word frequency and neighborhood density in the development of spoken-word recognition.
abstract: In this study, the effects of word-frequency and phonological similarity relations in the development of spoken-word recognition were examined. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and adults listened to increasingly longer segments of high- and low-frequency monosyllabic words with many or few word neighbors that sounded similar (neighborhood density). Older children and adults required less of the acoustic-phonetic information to recognize words with few neighbors and low-frequency words than did younger children. Adults recognized high-frequency words with few neighbors on the basis of less input than did all three of the children's groups. All subjects showed a higher proportion of different-word guesses for words with many versus few neighbors. A frequency x neighborhood density interaction revealed that recognition is facilitated for high-frequency words with few versus many neighbors; the opposite was found for low-frequency words. Results are placed within a developmental framework on the emergence of the phoneme as a unit in perceptual processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA. jm251@umail.umd.edu
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Metsala
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning