What do foreign neighbors say about the mental lexicon?
A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the processing and representation of word-forms in bilinguals.
Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.
Michael S
MS
Vitevitch
English; Spanish; corpus analysis; phonological neighbor