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Interamerican Journal of Psychology

Print version ISSN 0034-9690

Abstract

JUSTI, Francis Ricardo dos Reis  and  PINHEIRO, Ângela Maria Vieira. The effect of orthographic neighborhood in brazilian children: lexical decision task study. Interam. j. psychol. [online]. 2008, vol.42, n.3, pp. 559-569. ISSN 0034-9690.

In this study two experiments were developed to investigate the orthographic neighborhood effect on word recognition in 4th grade Brazilian Portuguese speaking school children. In the first, a lexical decision task of the Go/No-Go type was conducted, controlling the lexical activation index of words and pseudowords, an inhibitory effect of the number of neighbors (N) and of the number of neighbors of greater frequency than the target word (NF) was observed. In the second, a lexical decision task under a time-limit, the stimuli were presented briefly (250 ms) followed by a mask and the speed of the responses was emphasized. Compared with previous studies with adults in which, in these conditions, facilitative effects of N were observed, in this second experiment, the children continued to show an inhibitory effect of NF. It was argued that the orthographic neighborhood effect is genuinely inhibitory for Brazilian Portuguese and children, in contrast to adults, can present difficulties in employing strategies in the lexical decision task.

Keywords : Orthographic neighborhood; Visual word recognition; Lexical decision task.

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