Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA.
Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (CAS), China.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 May;76(5):1011-1025. doi: 10.1177/17470218221102878. Epub 2022 Jun 20.
A growing body of research suggests that visual word recognition is error-prone, and that errors may contribute to inhibitory neighbour frequency effects in word identification and reading. The present study used the neighbourhood frequency effect to examine the relationship between lexical competition and error making during visual word recognition. A novel adaptation of the visual world paradigm (VWP) was used, in which participants selected a briefly presented printed target word from an array containing the target, its higher- or lower-frequency neighbour, an orthographic onset competitor, and an orthographically unrelated distractor word. Analyses of the visual inspection of the arrays suggested that lexical competition occurred when words were correctly identified, as competitors were preferentially viewed as a function of their orthographic similarity with the target, and higher-frequency neighbours were preferentially viewed over lower-frequency neighbours. Orthographic similarity and neighbour frequency also influenced error making. Targets were often mistaken for their neighbours, and these errors were more common for targets with higher-frequency neighbours. The time course of target and neighbour viewing for error trials also provided preliminary evidence for two kinds of errors: early-occurring, perceptual errors and later-occurring selection errors that resulted from unsuccessfully resolved lexical competition. Together, these findings suggest that neighbour frequency effects reflect the contribution of both general lexical competition and occasional errors.
越来越多的研究表明，视觉单词识别容易出错，并且错误可能会导致单词识别和阅读中的抑制邻居频率效应。本研究使用邻频效应来检验视觉单词识别过程中词汇竞争和错误产生之间的关系。采用了一种新颖的视觉世界范式 (VWP) 的改编版，参与者从包含目标、其高频或低频邻居、字形起始竞争词和字形无关的干扰词的数组中选择短暂呈现的打印目标词。对数组的视觉检查分析表明，当单词被正确识别时会发生词汇竞争，因为竞争者会根据与目标的字形相似性而被优先查看，并且高频邻居会优先于低频邻居被查看。字形相似性和邻居频率也会影响错误的产生。目标词经常被误认为是它们的邻居，而这些错误在具有高频邻居的目标词中更为常见。错误试验的目标和邻居查看的时间过程也为两种错误提供了初步证据：早期发生的、感知错误和后来发生的由于词汇竞争未解决而导致的选择错误。总之，这些发现表明，邻频效应反映了一般词汇竞争和偶尔错误的共同作用。
