Many theories of language production and perception assume that in the normal course of processing a word, additional non-target words (lexical neighbors) become active. The properties of these neighbors can provide insight into the structure of representations and processing mechanisms in the language processing system. To infer the properties of neighbors, we examined the non-semantic errors produced in both spoken and written word production by four individuals who suffered neurological injury. Using converging evidence from multiple language tasks, we first demonstrate that the errors originate in disruption to the processes involved in the retrieval of word form representations from long-term memory. The targets and errors produced were then examined for their similarity along a number of dimensions. A novel statistical simulation procedure was developed to determine the significance of the observed similarities between targets and errors relative to multiple chance baselines. The results reveal that in addition to position-specific form overlap (the only consistent claim of traditional definitions of neighborhood structure) the dimensions of lexical frequency, grammatical category, target length and initial segment independently contribute to the activation of non-target words in both spoken and written production. Additional analyses confirm the relevance of these dimensions for word production showing that, in both written and spoken modalities, the retrieval of a target word is facilitated by increasing neighborhood density, as defined by the results of the target-error analyses.

中文翻译：

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马拉普罗普夫人的邻居：利用单词错误揭示邻居结构


许多语言产生和感知的理论假设在处理单词的正常过程中，其他非目标单词（词汇邻居）变得活跃。这些邻居的属性可以提供对语言处理系统中表示结构和处理机制的深入了解。为了推断邻居的属性，我们检查了四名神经损伤患者在口语和书面语言中产生的非语义错误。使用来自多个语言任务的聚合证据，我们首先证明错误源于对从长期记忆中检索单词形式表征的过程的破坏。然后检查目标和产生的误差在多个维度上的相似性。开发了一种新颖的统计模拟程序，以确定相对于多个机会基线的目标和误差之间观察到的相似性的显着性。结果表明，除了位置特定的形式重叠（邻域结构传统定义的唯一一致的主张）之外，词汇频率、语法类别、目标长度和初始片段的维度独立地有助于非目标词的激活口语和书面作品。其他分析证实了这些维度与单词产生的相关性，表明在书面和口语模式中，通过增加邻域密度（如目标错误分析的结果所定义）来促进目标单词的检索。