Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

The accuracy of deaf adults' letter report was greater for real and nonsense words than for pseudowords, and error analysis shows deaf adults tend to produce orthographically regular responses. These findings indicate clearly the use of orthographic structure in word recognition. (MSE)