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

Short-term recall is strongly influenced by lexical organisation, but it remains unclear whether co-activation of orthographic neighbours primarily facilitates recall or produces competition and interference. To address this issue, we examined the effect of neighbour frequency across seven experiments in three languages. Four experiments tested the effect in French using complex span and immediate serial recall. Two experiments then examined the effect in English, followed by a final experiment in Spanish. Across the four French experiments, neighbour frequency did not affect recall. In contrast, both English experiments revealed a reliable facilitatory effect, with better recall for words with high-frequency than low-frequency orthographic neighbours. The Spanish experiment patterned with French and again showed no effect. Taken together, these findings indicate that the influence of neighbour frequency on short-term recall is not uniform across languages. Rather than supporting a simple facilitation-versus-inhibition dichotomy, the results suggest that the net consequences of neighbour co-activation depend on how facilitative and competitive influences are weighted within a given lexical system.