فاطمه نعمتی

Words have been found to have a fundamental role in developments in any subfield of cognitive science including psycholinguistics. Word recognition process in English as a foreign language is strongly affected by learners’ native language. Among linguistic factors influencing this process in both native and foreign language are the orthographic and phonological neighborhood density (the number words identical to the target word except for only one letter or one phoneme, respectively) of the words. However, these effects are surrounded by some controversial findings in the literature. Moreover, in Persian no research has yet, to the best of my knowledge, investigated the influence of such cross-linguistic variables in processing visually represented words. This study aimed at filling this gap by investigating each variable in both Persian and English visual word recognition to figure out how and to what extent these variables affect lexical processing of Persian EFL learners, and to further compare their processing speed and accuracy for cross-linguistic effects. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) were used to measure the participants’ proficiency levels and their English vocabulary knowledge respectively. Then lexical decision tasks were administered by 36 Persian EFL learners to collect reaction time and accuracy of their responses. Data analyses were performed by employing Linear mixed-effects regression models and generalized linear mixed-effects regression models. The obtained results indicated that an increase of the orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes enhanced visual word recognition in English, while inhibited this process in Persian. These findings confirmed the role of cross-linguistic effects in visual word recognition. Our results are described within the context of a framework that involves phonological effects on visual word recognition.