earticle

영어

Cognitive processing of words involves integrating auditory and visual information extracted from the signal with lexical knowledge such as lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and the familiarity of the target word. Previous studies on mental lexicon, however, have shown controversies over how neighborhood density affects cognitive processing of the word. The purpose of the present study is two folds. The first is to verify the neighborhood density effect, which has been the ongoing disagreement between Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley et al., 2003) and Neighborhood Activation Model (Pisoni et al., 1985, Luce & Pisoni, 1998). The second is to present experimental results of cognitive processing among Korean L2 speakers of English. Both behavioral and ERP (event-related potential) experiments conducted in this study indicate that Neighborhood Activation Model provides a better explanation in cognitive processing of words than Lexical Restructuring Model.