Abstract

JUSTI, Francis Ricardo dos Reis  and  JUSTI, Cláudia Nascimento Guaraldo. Are orthographic neighborhood statistics of Portuguese and English words different?. Psicol. pesq. [online]. 2008, vol.2, n.2, pp. 61-73. ISSN 1982-1247.

This work aimed to evaluate two hypotheses: are traditional orthographic neighborhood measures (N and NF) correlated with transposed letter neighbors (TLN)? Could differences in the neighborhood structure of Portuguese and English words explain the differences observed in N and NF effects across these languages? To shed light on these issues orthographic neighborhood statistics were generated for 8465 Portuguese words. The difference between languages in the relevant variables were minor, making it difficult to explain the differences observed in N and NF effects across these languages appealing to differences in the neighborhood structure of Portuguese and English words. Another point of interest was the correlation between traditional orthographic neighborhood measures and TLN which were very low. Therefore, N and NF effects can hardly be explained by their relationships with TLN.

Keywords : Orthographic neighborhood; Lexical access; Visual word recognition; Corpus linguistics; Cross-language comparisons.

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