Orthographic neighborhood size, number of word meanings, and number of higher frequency neighbors

The present lexical decision task experiment examined orthographic (large. medium. small), number-of-meanings (ambiguous, unambiguous), and number of higher frequency neighbors (few, many), factors that have to date not been studied simultaneously. For both mean reaction time and percentage error, the critical three-way interaction between these factors was significant. Breakdown of this interaction revealed that the ambiguity effect (Unambiguous-ambiguous) decreased as neighborhood size increased, but only when there were many higher frequency neighbors in the neighborhood. These results appear inconsistent with serial search models but are understandable within the context of interactive-activation models of word recognition. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.