The influence of clustering coefficient on word-learning: how groups of similar sounding words facilitate acquisition

Clustering coefficient, C, measures the extent to which neighbors of a word are also neighbors of each other, and has been shown to influence speech production, speech perception, and several memory-related processes. In this study we examined how C influences word-learning. Participants were trained over three sessions at 1-week intervals, and tested with a picture-naming task on nonword-nonobject pairs. We found an advantage for novel words with high C (the neighbors of this novel word are likely to be neighbors with each other), but only after the 1-week retention period with no additional exposures to the stimuli. The results are consistent with the spreading-activation network-model of the lexicon proposed by Chan and Vitevitch (2009). The influence of C on various language-related processes suggests that characteristics of the individual word are not the only things that influence processing; rather, lexical processing may also be influenced by the relationships that exist among words in the lexicon.