The influence of lexical status and neighborhood density on childrenʹs nonword repetition

This study examined effects of lexical status and neighborhood density of constituent syllables on children’s nonword repetition and interactions with nonword length. Lexical status of the target syllable impacted repetition accuracy for the longest nonwords. In addition, children made more errors that changed a nonword syllable to a word syllable than the reverse. Syllables from dense versus sparse neighborhoods were repeated more accurately in three- and four-syllable nonwords, but there was no effect of density for two-syllable nonwords. The effect of neighborhood density was greater for a low versus high vocabulary group. Finally, children’s error responses were frommore dense neighborhoods than the target syllables. The results are congruent with models of nonword repetition that emphasize the influence of long-term lexical knowledge on children’s performance.