Do High-Frequency Neighbours Help or Hurt Short-Term Recall? Evidence From French, English, and Spanish

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Short-term recall is influenced by lexical organization.
• The role of orthographic neighbor co-activation in recall (facilitation vs. interference) is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of orthographic neighbor frequency on short-term recall.
• To determine if this effect varies across different languages.

Main Methods:

• Conducted seven experiments across three languages: French, English, and Spanish.
• Utilized complex span and immediate serial recall tasks.
• Manipulated the frequency of orthographic neighbors for target words.

Main Results:

• No significant effect of neighbor frequency on recall was found in French experiments.
• English experiments demonstrated a facilitatory effect: higher recall for words with high-frequency neighbors.
• The Spanish experiment mirrored the French findings, showing no effect of neighbor frequency.

Conclusions:

• The influence of orthographic neighbor frequency on short-term recall is language-dependent.
• Findings suggest that the balance between facilitatory and competitive lexical co-activation effects varies across languages.
• Challenges a simple facilitation-versus-inhibition model, proposing a more nuanced, language-specific interaction.