Research has shown that repeated encounters with the same stimulus facilitate processing of that stimulus at later encounters; it is as if the brain also seemed to better its performance following the maxim of body training: "practice makes perfect". In visual word recognition "practice" translates into the 'word frequency effect': very frequently encountered words are reacted to faster and more accurately than are less frequent words. Word frequency, however, does not tell the whole story. Even when a word is presented in isolation, it seems that it may not be processed independently of other words that look very similar, that is, the orthographic neighbourhood of that word. A word's orthographic neighbourhood comprises the set of real words that can be generated by replacing only one letter at a time in every letter position of the word. For example, the words 'pane', 'cane', 'line', 'late' and 'land' are all orthographic neighbours of the word 'lane'.
In recent years, a number of studies in English have focused on the effects of neighbourhood on word recognition. In particular, researchers have examined the effects of the size of the neighbourhood, and the frequency of the neighbours themselves. So far, results appear to be contradictory. On the one hand, Andrews (1989, 1992) reports that large neighbourhoods facilitate lexical access ('neighbourhood size effect'). On the other hand, Grainger (1990), Grainger, O'Regan, Jacobs and Segui (1989) and Grainger and Segui (1990) report that neighbours with frequency higher than that of the target word inhibit lexical access ('neighbourhood frequency effect'). The contradiction seems to be posed by the fact that large neighbourhoods typically contain high frequency neighbours in the set. Relatively little, however, has been done in Spanish.This paper proposes a preliminary study with two aims: first, to explore if standard findings regarding word frequency and neighbourhood effects are also found in Spanish processing, and second, to attempt to shed some light, again in the context of Spanish, on the seeming contradiction in the relation between neighbourhood size and neighbourhood frequency.
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