TY - JOUR
T1 - No enemies in the neighborhood
T2 - Absence of inhibitory neighborhood effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization
AU - Forster, Kenneth I.
AU - Shen, Di
PY - 1996/5
Y1 - 1996/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1037/0278-7393.22.3.696
DO - 10.1037/0278-7393.22.3.696
M3 - Article
C2 - 8656152
AN - SCOPUS:0030137215
SN - 0278-7393
VL - 22
SP - 696
EP - 713
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
IS - 3
ER -