Ithaca College

Skott Freedman Jones, associate professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, and Ithaca College alumnae Meredith Gennaro and Amanda DiTomaso recently had an article titled "Revisiting neighborhood density: Adult perception of phonological similarity" published in Applied Psycholinguistics. 

ABSTRACT 

Phonological similarity (i.e., neighborhood density) has been operationalized in the literature as a single phonemic difference between words. However, few studies have assessed the validity of such a measure. In the present study, 50 typical adults were presented with 70 nonwords and asked to name a similar-sounding real word for each item. Results indicated that participants changed an average of one segment per word, although a fifth of productions involved changing more than one of the segments; substitutions were the most common change. Targets that received a wide variety of responses and that did not phonologically resemble many real words resulted in the greatest number of changes. Using a single-segmental metric to index phonological similarity has its limitations, and may inadequately incorporate other influential elements of a word such as the frequencies of its neighbors.