No enemies in the neighborhood: Absence of inhibitory neighborhood effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization

The effect of neighborhood density on visual word recognition was found to be facilitatory for words but inhibitory for nonwords in 3 lexical-decision experiments. However, the facilitation virtually disappeared when the task was changed to semantic categorization (animal vs. nonanimal), despite the presence of a strong frequency effect. None of these experiments showed a consistent inhibitory effect of a higher frequency neighbor. The absence of inhibitory effects suggests that competition does not play a key role in visual word recognition. The data also suggest that the neighborhood density effect is not an access effect but is a task-dependent effect instead.