O Efeito de Vizinhança Ortográfica no Português do Brasil: Acesso Lexical ou Processamento Estratégico?

Abstract

The effect of words with similar orthography on visual word recognition is known as the orthographic neighborhood effect. This study introduces two experiments developed to investigate this effect, conducted on university student speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The first experiment conducted a lexical decision task of the Go/No-Go type, controlling the lexical activation index of words and pseudo-words, and observing an inhibitory effect of the number of neighbors (“N”) and the number of neighbors of greater frequency than the target word (“NF”). The second experiment conducted a lexical decision task under a time-limit, encouraging strategic processing and observing a facilitative effect of “N” in visual word recognition. Current models of word recognition were evaluated in light of these data, with the conclusion that the data best support models proposing a competition among lexical units.