Distributional analyses in auditory lexical decision: neighborhood density and word-frequency effects

In the present article, the effects of phonological neighborhood density and word frequency in spoken word recognition were examined using distributional analyses of response latencies in auditory lexical decision. A density x frequency interaction was observed in mean latencies; frequency effects were larger for low-density words than for high-density words. Distributional analyses further revealed that for low-density words, frequency effects were reflected in both distributional shifting and skewing, whereas for high-density words, frequency effects were purely mediated by distributional skewing. The results suggest that word frequency plays a role in early auditory word recognition only when there is relatively little competition between similar-sounding words, and that frequency effects in high-density words reflect postlexical checking.