Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A new Bayesian model of visual word recognition is used tosimulate neighborhood frequency effects in lexical decision.These effects have been reported as being either facilitatory orinhibitory in behavioral experiments. Our model manages tosimulate the apparently contradictory findings. Indeed, study-ing the dynamic time course of information accumulation inthe model shows that effects are facilitatory early, and becomeinhibitory at later stages. The model provides new insights onthe mechanisms at play and their dynamics, leading to betterunderstand the experimental conditions that should yield a fa-cilitatory or an inhibitory neighborhood frequency effect.