AN EXAMINATION OF SIMILARITY NEIGHBORHOODS IN YOUNG CHILDRENS RECEPTIVE VOCABULARIES

Based on an analysis of similarity neighbourhoods of words in children 's lexicons, Dollaghan (1994) argues that because of the degree of pho nological overlap among lexical items in memory, children must perform detailed acoustic-phonetic analyses in order to recognize spoken word s. This is in contradiction to Charles-Luce & Luce (1990), who reporte d that the similarity neighbourhoods in younger children's expressive lexicons are sparse relative to older children's and adult lexicons an d that young children may be able to use more global word recognition strategies. The current investigation re-examined these issues. Simila rity neighbourhoods of young children's RECEPTIVE vocabularies were an alysed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pat tern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was repli cated.