This paper reviews recent research on the effects of “orthographic
neighbors” (i.e., words that can be created by changing one letter of the
stimulus item, preserving letter positions, see Coltheart et al., 1977) on
reading and laboratory word identification tasks. We begin this paper with a
literature review on the two basic “neighborhood” effects (neighborhood
size and neighborhood frequency). This review shows that the number of
higher frequency neighbors is inhibitory in reading. We also examine the
influence of orthographic structure in form- and repetition-priming effects,
which again suggests that orthographic neighbors seem to play an inhibitory
role in the selection process. Finally, we discuss the empirical evidence in the
context of current models of visual word recognition and reading.Psicologí
