{"pk":33588,"title":"Canvassing the whole neighborhood: A large-scale view of neighbor network structure, and how it relates to lexical processing","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>Lexical processing reflects patterns of phonological and/or orthographic similarity among words. One approach to explaining this is to conceive of the mental lexicon as being structured according to these similarity patterns, and to model that structure as a network, most commonly by connecting each word to its immediate neighbors. Evidence that lexical processing is related to structure beyond the size of words’ immediate neighborhoods suggests that network analyses can capture psycholinguistically relevant structural patterns in the lexicon, but it remains unclear how that structure is represented in the mind and how it relates to the mechanisms used in the most prominent theoretical approaches to explaining lexical processing. To shed light on this issue, we use a latent variable approach to identify the underlying dimensions of phonological and orthographic structure in the lexicon by modeling multiple network-derived properties and testing those dimensions against word recognition data from two mega-studies. Our results confirm the importance of network measures and show that their effects on behavior are captured by three latent constructs: how densely words are packed in the region surrounding a target word (not just immediate neighbors), the interconnectedness of words residing near a target, and target words’ connectedness to multiple subregions of the network (cf. community structure). We propose that these latent constructs offer crucial guidance for interpreting the theoretical idea of structure in the mental lexicon, inviting new explanations for why words are distributed in this way, and for how structure relates to theoretical accounts of lexical processing. </p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Regular Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fr520rs","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Matthew","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Carlson","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":"Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and Center for Language Science"},{"first_name":"Dominick","middle_name":"","last_name":"DiMercurio II","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":"Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Center for Language Science"},{"first_name":"Victoria","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Gertel","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":"Department of Psychology and Center for Language Science"},{"first_name":"Michele","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Diaz","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":"Department of Psychology and Center for Language Science"},{"first_name":"Chaleece","middle_name":"W.","last_name":"Sandberg","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":"Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Center for Language Science"}],"date_submitted":"2024-08-08T15:31:35.771000+02:00","date_accepted":"2025-05-09T22:13:47.524000+02:00","date_published":"2025-06-24T00:00:00+02:00","render_galley":{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/33588/galley/36532/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/33588/galley/36531/download/"},{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/33588/galley/36532/download/"}]}