The effects of neighborhood frequency in reading and lexical decision.

To test the effect of the frequency of orthographic "neighbors" on the identification of a printed word, two sets of words were constructed (equated on the number of neighbors, word frequency, and number of letters); in one set, the words had no higher frequency neighbors and in the other set, they had at least one higher frequency neighbor. Identification was slower for the latter set. In Experiment 1, this was indexed by longer response times in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, the target words were embedded in sentences, and slower identification was indexed by disruptions in reading: more regressions back to the words with higher frequency neighbors and longer fixations on the text immediately following these words. The latter results indicate that a higher frequency neighbor affects relatively late stages of lexical access, an interpretation consistent with both activation-verification and interactive activation models.