Restructuring of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon

Restructuring of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon.

Previous evidence suggests that the structure of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon may differ from that of the fully developed lexicon. The similarity relationships used to organize words into neighbourhoods was investigated in 20 pre-school children (age 3;7 to 5;11) using a two alternative forced-choice classification task. Children classified the similarity of test w...

Phonological neighbourhoods in the developing lexicon.

Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to phonetic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calcu...

Dimensions of similarity in the mental lexicon.

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remain...

Sound Similarity Relations in the Mental Lexicon

The standard definition of neighborhood density defines two words to be neighbors if they differ by one and only one segment (Luce & Pisoni, 1998). This definition assumes that the length of the shared part is irrelevant to sound similarity. However, confusability of non-linguistic sound sequences (Fallon Coble & Robinson, 1992; Kidd & Watson, 1992) as well as judgments of sound similarity betw...

Homonymy in the Developing Mental Lexicon