Neighbourhood density effects in auditory nonword processing in aphasia

Abstract

The question how prior knowledge of words affects processing of nonwords is important with respect to the study of lexical access and lexical competition. According to the Neighbourhood Activation model (Luce & Pisoni, 1998), the auditory presentation of a word or nonword yields automatic activation of all words in the mental lexicon that sound similar. Experimental results with unimpaired listeners on a lexical decision task showed that nonwords with dense lexical neighbourhoods led to slower responses and lower accuracy rates than nonwords with sparse neighbourhoods: the nonword must be compared against existing entries, which takes more time when there are more neighbours.