Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, 390 Drillfield Drive, Blacksburg, VA, 24060, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2024 Nov;52(8):1871-1881. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01658-w. Epub 2024 Nov 5.
A word's orthographic neighborhood is the set of words that differ from the target word by one letter. Both Roodenrys (2009) and Robert et al. (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 119-125, 2015) posit that orthographic neighbors are activated when the target word is encountered in tasks such as simple and complex span. The two accounts differ in that the former predicts a beneficial effect of this activation, because it produces feedback activation that helps redintegrate the target word, whereas the latter predicts a detrimental effect, because the need to overcome the greater interference from the larger number of higher-frequency items reduces the processing resources available. Four experiments assess the predictions of these two accounts. Experiments 1 and 2 found a beneficial effect of having a higher- compared with a lower-frequency neighborhood in both a simple and a complex span task. Experiments 3 and 4 found no detrimental effect of having one or more neighbors with higher frequency than the target in both a simple and complex span task. Implications for the two theories are discussed.
一个单词的正字法邻域是指与目标单词仅相差一个字母的单词集合。Roodenrys（2009）和 Robert 等人（《心理语言学研究杂志》，44，119-125，2015）都假设在简单和复杂跨度等任务中遇到目标单词时会激活正字法邻域。这两个解释存在差异，前者预测这种激活会产生有益的影响，因为它会产生反馈激活，有助于重新整合目标单词，而后者则预测会产生不利的影响，因为需要克服更大数量的更高频率项目带来的更大干扰，会减少可用的处理资源。四项实验评估了这两个解释的预测。实验 1 和 2 发现，在简单和复杂跨度任务中，与低频邻域相比，具有更高频率邻域的单词会产生有益的影响。实验 3 和 4 发现，在简单和复杂跨度任务中，一个或多个邻域的频率高于目标时，不会产生不利影响。对这两个理论的影响进行了讨论。
