Recent studies have found that masked word primes that are orthographic neighbors of the target inhibit lexical decision latencies (Davis & Lupker, 2006; Nakayama, Sears, & Lupker, 2008), consistent with the predictions of lexical competition models of visual word identification (e.g., Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). In contrast, using the…

Two main theories of visual word recognition have been developed regarding the way orthographic units in printed words map onto phonological units in spoken words. One theory suggests that a string of single letters or letter clusters corresponds to a string of phonemes (Coltheart, 1978; Venezky, 1970), while the other suggests that a string of…

A word from a dense neighborhood is often read aloud faster than a word from a sparse neighborhood. This advantage is usually attributed to orthography, but orthographic and phonological neighbors are typically confounded. Two experiments investigated the effect of neighborhood density on reading aloud when phonological density was varied while…