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Updated: Jul 24, 2026

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
Phonotactics, neighborhood activation, and lexical access for spoken words
M S Vitevitch1, P A Luce, D B Pisoni
1Speech Research Laboratory, Indiana University, Bloomington 47405, USA.
Abstract:
Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments and sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood density, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are responded to more quickly than nonsense words with low probability segments and sequences, whereas real words occurring in dense similarity neighborhoods are responded to more slowly than real words occurring in sparse similarity neighborhoods. This contradiction may be resolved by hypothesizing that effects of probabilistic phonotactics have a sublexical focus and that effects of similarity neighborhood density have a lexical focus. The implications of this hypothesis for models of spoken word recognition are discussed.
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