Lexical Neighborhoods and Subjective Intelligibility Ratings: A Preliminary Report

Recent research has shown that lexical properties known to influence word recognition – namely, frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency – also affect the pronunciation of words (e.g., Balota & Chumbley, 1985; Goldinger & Summers, 1989; Wright, 1997). These findings could be explained within a cooperative framework, according to which speakers continually assess the ability of listeners to recover the message, and modify their pronunciations accordingly. However, this account assumes that speakers can somehow determine the effects of certain lexical properties on intelligibility. In this paper, we report a preliminary study in which subjects rated how intelligible they thought different words would be in an imagined noisy environment. The results suggest that speakers can indeed predict how lexical neighborhood characteristics influence word recognition.