The influence of neighborhood density (and neighborhood frequency) in Spanish speech production: A follow-up report

Vitevitch & Stamer (2006) observed that Spanish speakers in a picture-naming task named words with dense neighborhoods more slowly than words with sparse neighborhoods; a finding that contrasts with results typically obtained in studies of speech production in English (Vitevitch, 2002b). Baus, Costa & Carreiras (2008) raised concerns about the stimuli employed in Vitevitch & Stamer (2006), and found with a different set of pictures that Spanish speakers in a picture-naming task named words with dense neighborhoods more quickly than words with sparse neighborhoods. Several supplemental analyses of the stimuli employed in Vitevitch & Stamer (2006) are reported. Furthermore, the results of a picture-naming experiment raise concerns about the stimuli used by Baus, Costa & Carreiras (2008). Finally, an analysis of naming times from an independent set of pictures (Bates et al., 2003) replicated the pattern of results initially observed in Vitevitch & Stamer (2006): phonologically similar words compete during speech production in Spanish.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Kansas through the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) R01 DC 006472), the Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development P30 HD002528), and the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (NIDCD P30 DC005803)