Neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency effects in French spoken word recognition

According to activation-based models of spoken word recognition, words with many and high frequency neighbors are processed more slowly than words with few and low frequency neighbors. Because empirical support for inhibitory neighborhood effects comes mainly from studies conducted in English, the effects of neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency were examined in French. As typically observed in English, we found that words residing in dense neighborhoods are recognized more slowly than words residing in sparse neighborhoods. Moreover, we showed that words with higher frequency neighbors are processed more slowly than words with no higher frequency neighbors. Implications of theses results for spoken word recognition are discussed