Purpose—The purpose was to determine the number of semantic neighbors, namely semantic set size, for 88 nonobjects (Kroll & Potter, 1984) and determine how semantic set size related to other measures and age. Method—Data were collected from 82 adults and 92 preschool children in a discrete association task. The nonobjects were presented via computer, and participants reported the first word tha...

Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label beca...

The influence of 2-hop density on spoken word recognition was investigated. 2-hop density measures the density of connections among the phonological neighbors (i.e., 1-hop neighbors) and phonological neighbors of those neighbors (i.e., 2-hop neighbors) of a target word. In both naming and lexical decision tasks, words with low 2-hop density were recognized more quickly than words with high 2-ho...