Neighborhood frequency effects in simple and complex span: Do high-frequency neighbors help or hurt?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Orthographic neighbors are words differing by one letter.
• Theories debate whether neighbor activation aids or hinders word processing during memory tasks.
• Roodenrys (2009) predicts benefits from feedback activation, while Robert et al. (2015) predict detriments due to interference.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically test competing theories on the role of orthographic neighbors in memory tasks.
• To investigate whether neighbor frequency influences performance in simple and complex span tasks.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments were conducted using simple and complex span tasks.
• Participants' performance was assessed with varying orthographic neighborhood characteristics (frequency and size).

Main Results:

• Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated a beneficial effect of higher-frequency neighborhoods in both simple and complex span tasks.
• Experiments 3 and 4 found no detrimental effect from neighbors with higher frequency than the target word.

Conclusions:

• The findings support theories predicting a beneficial role for orthographic neighbors in word recognition and memory.
• The results suggest that increased interference from higher-frequency neighbors does not impair performance in span tasks.