Citation

Forster KI, Shen D. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 1996; 22(3): 696-713.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, USA. kforster@u.arizona.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 1996, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

8656152

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.

Language: en