LEXICAL NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS IN PHONETIC PROCESSING

Previous research on spoken word recognition has demonstrated that ide ntification of a phonetic segment is affected by the lexical status of the item in which the segment occurs. W. F. Ganong (1980) demonstrate d that a category boundary shift occurs when the voiced end of 1 voice -onset time continuum is a word but the voiceless end of another serie s is a word; this is known as the ''lexical effect.'' A series of stud ies was undertaken to examine how lexical neighborhood, in contrast to lexical status, might influence word perception. Pairs of nonword ser ies were created in which the voiced end of 1 series had a higher freq uency weighted neighborhood density, whereas the reverse was true for the other series. Lexical neighborhood was found to affect word recogn ition in much the same way as lexical status.