An examination of similarity neighbourhoods in young children's receptive vocabularies

Based on an analysis of similarity neighbourhoods of words in children's lexicons, Dollaghan (1994) argues that because of the degree of phonological overlap among lexical items in memory, children must perform detailed acoustic-phonetic analyses in order to recognize spoken words. This is in contradiction to Charles-Luce & Luce (1990), who reported that the similarity neighbourhoods in younger children's expressive lexicons are sparse relative to older children's and adult lexicons and that young children may be able to use more global word recognition strategies. The current investigation re-examined these issues. Similarity neighbourhoods of young children's receptive vocabularies were analysed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated.