Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When pronouncing novel/unknown words, readers often use prior experience with similar, neighbor words. Com-parison to neighbors can be helpful for unknown or novel words (wug is like pug), but it can also lead to errors (pint is notlike mint). We investigate whether pronunciation can be affected by top-down influences, specifically the perceived taboo-nessof a known neighbor. While orthographic similarity typically biases novel-word pronunciation to be similar to a known word,taboo-ness might bias pronunciation away from a likely one. Adults read aloud words from three lists– novel words that wereneighbors to taboo words, novel words that were neighbors to benign words, and known control words. All known neighborsand controls were frequency matched. Results show differences in the correspondence between pronunciation of novel wordsand known neighbors depending on the relative taboo-ness of the known neighbor. Findings suggest that perceived taboo-nesshas top-down influences on reading.