Neural Cognitive Correlates of Orthographic Neighborhood Size Effect for Children During Chinese Naming

A lot of researchers are concerned of orthographic neighborhood (N) effect (Andrews, 1989, 1992; Carreiras et al., 1997; Laxon et al., 1988; Peereman & Content, 1995; Sears et al., 2006), which can reflect how the potential word candidates with similar orthography affect the word naming task. In alphabetic writing systems, orthographic neighborhood refers to a word pool, which is consisted by changing one letter of a given word while keeping other letters unchanged (Coltheart et al., 1977). Behavioral researches with naming tasks have reported a facilitatory effect of N size (Andrews, 1989, 1992; Carreiras et al., 1997; Peereman & Content, 1995; Sears et al., 1995), which the presence of many orthographic neighbors facilities phonological retrieval of the target word, and such facilitation would be more prominent for low-frequency words (Andrews, 1989, 1992; Peereman & Content, 1995). This large N advantage is also found as orthographic distinctiveness effect in memory (Glanc & Greene, 2007; 2009). Modeling researches suggested that the facilitation of large N arises from the overlapping phonemes of their neighbors (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the feedback activations from orthographic units to feature units strengthen the phonological retrieval (Reynolds & Besner, 2002). Recently, Fiebach et al. (2007) examine the neural mechanisms of N size effect using fMRI. Their results demonstrated the interactions of lexicality and N size in mid-dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex, suggesting domain general processes during word recognition.