Tracking the time course of phonological neighborhood clustering effects in spoken word recognition

This study used visual-world eye tracking to examine the effect—first observed in Chan and Vitevitch (2009)—of the phonological neighborhood clustering coefficient on the time course of lexical access in spoken word recognition. Target words from neighborhoods with relatively high clustering (i.e., neighbors of the target word are also neighbors of each other) showed a significant lag in eye fixations relative to words from less clustered neighborhoods after controlling for neighborhood density, target frequency, neighborhood frequency, and multiple phonotactic probability measures. This effect was also influenced by lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency, suggesting that neighborhood clustering influences spoken word recognition, and should be included in models of this process.