Neighborhood density effects in spoken word recognition in Spanish.

The present work examined the relationships among familiarity ratings, frequency of occurrence, neighborhood density, and word length in a corpus of Spanish words. The observed relationships were similar to the relationships found among the same variables in English. An auditory lexical decision task was then performed to examine the influence of word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency on spoken word recognition in Spanish. In contrast to the competitive effect of phonological neighborhoods typically observed in English, a facilitative effect of neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency was found in Spanish. Implications for models of spoken word recognition and language disorders are discussed.