An Examination of Lexical Neighborhood Density in Young Children’s Word Learning and Phonological Awareness
Date
2025-09
Authors
Lewis, Christopher
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Mount Saint Vincent University
Abstract
The lexical restructuring model aims to explain the developmental origins of the phoneme as a unit in implicit and explicit phonological processing tasks (Metsala & Walley, 1998). Very little research, however, has directly examined the claims of the model using experimental methods — best suited for testing causal claims. One way this study explored claims of this model was by attempting to manipulate the lexical neighborhood density for a subset of items and examining the effects on early elementary students’ word learning and phonemic awareness. Additionally, the associations between task performance for items from different neighborhood densities and early literacy-related skills were examined. Twenty-nine students in kindergarten and 33 students in grades one and two completed a word learning training task that introduced 18 nonword-nonobject pairs. Six nonwords were from sparse neighborhoods, but had phonological neighbors introduced during the learning task (creating a sparse-to-dense condition) to experimentally facilitate lexical restructuring — or direct attention to the internal structure of these new items. Immediate word learning measures and pre- and post-test phonemic blending for the 18 nonwords were completed. Measures of word reading, phonological awareness, and nonword repetition were also completed. Overall, introducing neighbors for the six items did not facilitate word learning. However, the younger group did show greater gains in pre-to-post-test phoneme blending for items in the sparse-to-dense condition compared to items in the sparse and the dense conditions. Furthermore, repetition of multisyllabic nonwords composed of syllables with few lexical neighbors explained unique variance in word learning beyond grade and repetition of nonwords with many lexical neighbors. In the final analysis, phoneme blending for sparse nonwords explained unique variance in word reading beyond grade, general phonological awareness, and phoneme blending for dense nonwords. Overall, experimental support for a central claim of the lexical restructuring model was found in the younger sample. This study also provides correlational evidence related to the idea that processing words from sparse lexical neighborhoods (i.e., areas of the mental lexicon to undergo segmental restructuring the latest in development) is a better index of the degree of segmentation in lexical representations, and thus of individual differences in word reading development.