Phonotactics, neighborhood activation, and lexical access for spoken words

Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments a nd sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to th e number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood den sity, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are respo nded to more quickly than nonsense words with low probability segments and sequences, whereas real words occurring in dense similarity neighborhoods a re responded to more slowly than real words occurring in sparse similarity neighborhoods. This contradiction may be resolved by hypothesizing that eff ects of probabilistic phonotactics have a sublexical focus and that effects of similarity neighborhood density have a lexical focus. The implications of this hypothesis for models of spoken word recognition are discussed. (C) 1999 Academic Press.