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NoA’s ark: Influence of the number of associates in visual word recognition

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Abstract

The main aim of this study was to explore the extent to which the number of associates of a word (NoA) influences lexical access, in four tasks that focus on different processes of visual word recognition: lexical decision, reading aloud, progressive demasking, and online sentence reading. Results consistently showed that words with a dense associative neighborhood (high-NoA words) were processed faster than words with a sparse neighborhood (low-NoA words), extending previous findings from English lexical decision and categorization experiments. These results are interpreted in terms of the higher degree of semantic richness of high-NoA words as compared with low-NoA words. 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc. Author Note

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Basque Research Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language, BCBL, Bilbao, Spain

    Manuel Carreiras

  2. Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205, Tenerife, Spain

    Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Alberto Avilés & Manuel Carreiras

Authors
  1. Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
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  2. Alberto Avilés
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  3. Manuel Carreiras
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jon Andoni Duñabeitia.

Additional information

This research was supported by Grants SEJ2006-09238/PSIC and Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD-2008-00048 from the Spanish government and by Grant BFI05.310 from the Basque government. The authors thank M. Gillon-Dowens, O. Müller, A. Hantsch, and M. Dimitropoulou for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Duñabeitia, J.A., Avilés, A. & Carreiras, M. NoA’s ark: Influence of the number of associates in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15, 1072–1077 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1072

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1072

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