Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In visual word recognition, having more orthographicneighbors (words that differ by a single letter) generallyspeeds access to a target word. But neighbors can mismatch atany letter position. In light of evidence that informationcontent varies between letter positions, we consider howneighbor effects might vary across letter positions. Resultsfrom a word naming task indicate that response latencies arebetter predicted by the relative number of positional friendsand enemies (respectively, neighbors that match the target at agiven letter position and those that mismatch) at some letterpositions than at others. In particular, benefits from friendsare most pronounced at positions associated with low a prioriuncertainty (positional entropy). We consider how theseresults relate to previous accounts of position-specific effectsand how such effects might emerge in serial and parallelprocessing systems.