A central question in spoken word recognition research is whether words are recognized relationally, in the context of other words in the mental lexicon (McClelland and Elman, 1986, Luce and Pisoni, 1998). The current research evaluated metrics for measuring the influence of the mental lexicon on visually perceived (lipread) spoken word recognition. Lexical competition (the extent to which perceptually similar words influence recognition of a stimulus word) was quantified using metrics that are well-established in the literature, as well as a novel statistical method for calculating perceptual confusability, based on the Phi-square statistic.

The Phi-square statistic proved an effective measure for assessing lexical competition and explained significant variance in visual spoken word recognition beyond that accounted for by traditional metrics. Because these values include the influence of a large subset of the lexicon (rather than only perceptually similar words), it suggests that even perceptually distant words may receive some activation, and therefore provide competition, during spoken word recognition. This work supports and extends earlier research (Auer, 2002; Mattys et al., 2002) that proposed a common recognition system underlying auditory and visual spoken word recognition and provides support for the use of the Phi-square statistic for quantifying lexical competition.

口语单词识别研究的一个核心问题是单词是否在心理词典中的其他单词的上下文中被相关地识别（McClelland 和 Elman，1986 年；Luce 和 Pisoni，1998 年）。当前的研究评估了衡量心理词典对视觉感知（唇读）口语识别的影响的指标。词汇竞争（感知相似词影响刺激词识别的程度）使用文献中已确立的指标进行量化，以及基于 Phi-square 统计的用于计算感知混淆度的新统计方法。

Phi-square 统计证明是评估词汇竞争的有效措施，并解释了视觉口语识别的显着差异，超出了传统指标的解释范围。因为这些值包括词典的一个大子集（而不仅仅是感知上相似的词）的影响，这表明即使是感知上遥远的词也可能会收到一些激活，因此在口语单词识别过程中提供竞争。这项工作支持并扩展了早期的研究 (Auer, 2002; Mattys et al., 2002)，该研究提出了一个基于听觉和视觉口语识别的通用识别系统，并为使用 Phi-square 统计量来量化词汇竞争提供了支持。