The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts

This paper reviews recent research on the effects of orthographic neighbors on visual word recognition in order to resolve apparently contradictory findings. The review reveals that the empirical evidence is not as contradictory as has been claimed. Neighbors have consistently been reported to facilitate responses to words in naming and lexical decision tasks. Inhibitory effects of neighbors appear to arise from sophisticated guessing strategies in the perceptual identification task or lexical decision strategies adopted in unusual stimulus environments. For English words, there is minimal evidence of competitive influences on lexical retrieval due to higher frequency neighbors. Such effects are more common in such languages as French and Spanish, perhaps because they embody a more consistent relationship between orthography and phonology. These findings provide important constraints on assumptions about the form of lexical representations and the parallel activation mechanisms assumed to underlie lexical retrieval.