This study investigates whether semantic activation underlies the orthographic neighborhood size (ONS) effect in the recognition of Chinese two-character words. By manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency, the research compared the effects sizes of the neighborhood size across three experimental tasks: naming, lexical decision and sentence reading. The findings reveal that: (1) A facilitative effect of both neighborhood size and word frequency was observed across all three tasks. (2) There was no significant difference in the facilitative effect size of neighborhood size between the lexical decision and sentence reading tasks, though both were larger than in the naming task. (3) An interaction between neighborhood size and word frequency was found, with low-frequency words showing a stronger facilitative effect from neighborhood size compared to high-frequency words. In conclusion, this study further validates the Semantic Activation Model, highlighting the importance of semantic activation in the facilitative effect of orthographic neighborhood size during word recognition. Moreover, the recognition of Chinese two-character words is influenced by both word frequency and orthographic neighborhood size.
Xiong et al. (Tue,) studied this question.