Phonological neighborhoods and phonetic similarity in spoken word recognition

Abstract

English neighborhood literature has demonstrated that neighborhood density affects the auditory word recognition. However, an unresolved question is exactly how neighborhood density should be calculated. In this paper the definition of a lexical neighborhood is explored in Japanese. Data for the analyses were collected from Japanese neighborhood experiments using the same 700 test words and a lexicon that consisted of only nouns from the NTT psycholinguistic database [Amano and Konodo, 1999]. Three different neighborhood calculations were used to analyze the data. The first calculation was based on Greenberg–Jenkins phoneme substitution, deletion, and insertion rules. The second calculation included prosodic information as another dimension in the neighborhood calculation in order to reflect the finding that prosodic information has a vital role in Japanese word recognition. The third calculation was based on the auditory properties of the words in the lexicon. Neighborhood density was measured by comparing the similarity of cochleagrams of the 66<th>000 audio files. The results of the analyses demonstrated that phonological similarity within the lexicon seems to be calculated based on higher-level abstract representations rather than on a lower-level acoustic-auditory representation in any of the experiments. The implications from the results to the current word recognition theories will also be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]