The influence of known-word-frequency on the acquisition of new neighbors in adults: Evidence for exemplar representations in word-learning

Abstract

Previous studies showed that a new word that is similar to many known words will be learned better than a new word that is similar to few known words (Storkel et al., 2006). In the present study we created novel words that were phonological neighbors to lexical hermits—or known words that do not have any phonological neighbors—that varied in frequency of occurrence. After several exposures, participants learned a higher proportion of novel words that were neighbors of high frequency known-words than nonwords that were neighbors of low frequency known-words. The present results have implications for abstractionist versus exemplar models of the mental lexicon and language processing, as well as for accounts of word frequency in models of language processing.