Abstract :
Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies
show age-related effects of density on children’s performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring
of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological
awareness. To further investigate density effects and their implications for development of phonological
awareness, we compared performance on dense and sparse onset words.We adapted these materials to
three phonological awareness tests that were pretested on adults then administered to preschool children
who were expected to vary in phonological awareness skills. For both the adults and the children who
passed a phonological awareness screening task, dense onset neighborhoods were associated with
slower reaction times and increased errors. A separate comparison of word repetition by the children
who passed and who did not pass the phoneme awareness screening failed to provide evidence that
lexical restructuring was a sufficient condition for the attainment of phonological awareness. Both
groups of children more accurately repeated words from high onset density neighborhoods, regardless
of the level of their phonological awareness. Thus, we find no evidence of either age- or ability-driven
effects in children’s performance, contradictory to a view that the attainment of phoneme awareness
relates to developmental changes in the segmental representation of words in dense neighborhoods.
