Abstract
In this study, the effects of word-frequency and phonological similarity relations in the development of spoken-word recognition were examined. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and adults listened to increasingly longer segments of high- and low-frequency monosyllabic words with many or few word neighbors that sounded similar (neighborhood density). Older children and adults required less of the acoustic-phonetic information to recognize words with few neighbors and low-frequency words than did younger children. Adults recognized high-frequency words with few neighbors on the basis of less input than did all three of the children’s groups. All subjects showed a higher proportion of different-word guesses for words with many versus few neighbors. A frequency × neighborhood density interaction revealed that recognition is facilitated for high-frequency words with few versus many neighbors; the opposite was found for low-frequency words. Results are placed within a developmental framework on the emergence of the phoneme as a unit in perceptual processing.
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This research was supported by a postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by the Graduate Research Board at the University of Maryland.
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Metsala, J.L. An examination of word frequency and neighborhood density in the development of spoken-word recognition. Memory & Cognition 25, 47–56 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197284
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197284