The present study investigates the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency in reading Chinese two-character words. The neighborhood size of a word is defined as the summation of neighbors sharing the first constituent (neighborhood size 1) and the second constituent (neighborhood size 2) characters. The first experiment found two opposite neighborhood size effects in lexical dec...

According to activation-based models of spoken word recognition, words with many and high frequency neighbors are processed more slowly than words with few and low frequency neighbors. Because empirical support for inhibitory neighborhood effects comes mainly from studies conducted in English, the effects of neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency were examined in French. As typically o...

Participants read sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions or disappearing-text conditions (in which the word that was fixated disappeared after 60 ms). Even though the fixated word had disappeared after 60 ms, there was still a robust frequency effect wherein readers fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Thus, the re...

Event-related fMRI was used to evaluate the effect of printed word frequency on the subsequent recognition of words incidentally encoded while 16 healthy right-handed volunteers performed living/nonliving judgments. Semantic judgment took longer for low-frequency words. These words were more accurately recognized than high-frequency words at later testing. Low-frequency words were also associat...

The word-frequency mirror effect (Glanzer & Adams, 1985) is the finding that subjects are more accurate on low frequency words than high frequency words for old and new items in recognition memory. Recently, several theorists (Guttentag & Carroll, 1997; Joordens & Hockley, 2000; Reder et al., 2000) have proposed dual-process accounts of the word-frequency mirror effect. These accounts hypothesi...