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N-Watch: A program for deriving neighborhood size and other psycholinguistic statistics

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Abstract

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli, including measures of word frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, age of acquisition, and imageability. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words. The program computes measures of orthographic similarity on line, either with respect to a default vocabulary of 30,605 words or to a vocabulary specified by the user. In addition to providing standard orthographic neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available, free of charge, from the following Web site: http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/≈colin/N-Watch/.

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Correspondence to Colin J. Davis.

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Parts of this work were completed while the author was at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol.

Note—This article was accepted by the previous editor, Jonathan Vaughan.

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Davis, C.J. N-Watch: A program for deriving neighborhood size and other psycholinguistic statistics. Behavior Research Methods 37, 65–70 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206399

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