All Neighborhoods are not Created Equal: The Phonological P-Metric and Spoken Word Recognition

A great deal of work has shown that the size of the phonological neighborhood affects the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. Words with many similar sounding words (i.e., a dense neighborhood) are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words with few similar sounding words (i.e., a sparse neighborhood). However, little work has examined the structural differences that may exist among neighborhoods of equal size and the effects these differences may have on spoken word recognition. The current results suggest that such differences do exist among words with the same lexical density, and that these differences have demonstrable effects on the speed of spoken word recognition. The implications of these results for models of spoken word recognition are discussed.