Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A mainstay of models that account for the access of lexicalknowledge is that auditory words compete for selection basedon form similarity, commonly seen in an inhibitory effect togreater phonological neighborhood density (PND). PND is ametric that states that two words are neighbors if they differ bythe addition, deletion or substitution of a single phoneme. Adrawback to this account is that there is competing evidenceeven among the European languages investigated thus far. Wesought to verify whether the inhibitory effect of greater PNDwould hold for Mandarin Chinese in two auditory wordrepetition tasks with monosyllabic and disyllabic Mandarinwords. Results of Experiment 1 showed a facilitative effect togreater PND. Experiment 2 added a non-verbal distractor taskto lessen the putative effect of working memory load during thetask. The facilitative effect to greater PND was confirmedalong with a significant post-hoc interaction with memorydecay, operationalized as the duration spent on the distractortasks. The facilitative effects extend previous reports ofdifferential behavior due to linguistic typology.