Purpose: Methods from network science have examined various aspects of language processing. Clinical populations may also benefit from these novel analyses. Phonological and lexical factors have been examined in adults who stutter (AWS) as potential contributing factors to stuttering, although differences reported are often subtle. We reexamined…

It has been hypothesized that known words in the lexicon strengthen newly formed representations of novel words, resulting in words with dense neighborhoods being learned more quickly than words with sparse neighborhoods. Tests of this hypothesis in a connectionist network showed that words with dense neighborhoods were learned better than words…

Network science uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems such as the phonological lexicon (Vitevitch, 2008). The phonological network consists of a "giant component" (the largest connected component of the network) and "lexical islands" (smaller groups of words that are connected to each other, but not to the giant…

A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the…

Clustering coefficient--a measure derived from the new science of networks--refers to the proportion of phonological neighbors of a target word that are also neighbors of each other. Consider the words "bat", "hat", and "can", all of which are neighbors of the word "cat"; the words "bat" and…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…