Content area
Full text
Introduction
A significant phonological property of a word which influences its production and recognition is phonological neighborhood density (PND; Vitevitch & Luce, 2016). PND refers to the number of words that can be formed from a given word by substituting, adding or deleting one phoneme (Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). Words with many similar sounding neighbors, such as mash (e.g., smash, ash, cash, mush, mat), have a dense neighborhood, whereas words with few or no neighbors, such as fudge (judge, fun), have a sparse neighborhood. In English, Spanish, and French, words with dense neighborhoods have on average 22 neighbors whereas words with sparse neighborhoods have about 6 neighbors (Yates, Friend & Ploetz, 2008).
Cross-linguistic studies have shown that PND influences both word production and recognition in different ways, depending on the language (e.g., Harley & Brown, 1998; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Vitevitch, 2002; Vitevitch & Luce, 1998, 1999; Vitevitch & Sommers, 2003). For English-speaking adult participants in word production experiments, Vitevitch (2002) demonstrated that words with dense neighborhoods were produced on average 25 ms faster than words with sparse neighborhoods. By contrast, in word recognition tasks, Luce and Pisoni (1998) showed that words with dense neighborhoods were recognized to about 102 ms slower than words with sparse neighborhoods. The same PND pattern in word production and recognition was found in experiments with French-speaking adults (Dufour & Frauenfelder, 2010; Zeigler & Muneaux, 2007; Zeigler, Muneaux & Grainger, 2003). However, a strong reverse PND pattern was shown for Spanish-speaking adults: words with dense neighborhoods were produced slower than words with sparse neighborhoods, whereas a dense neighborhood facilitated word recognition (Sadat, Martin, Costa & Alario, 2014; Vitevitch & Rodríguez, 2004; Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006).
How can these cross-linguistic differences of the PND effects between English/French and Spanish be explained? Vitevitch and Stamer (2006) suggested that the reverse PND pattern found in Spanish word production and recognition may be caused by the difference in the amount of inflections between Spanish and English. In comparison to English, the Spanish language is more inflected, i.e., affixes, indicating gender and number in nouns, are used to a greater extent. For example, the Spanish nouns niño ‘a male child’ and niña ‘a female child’ are phonological neighbors but they are...