The present study explored the time course of neighborhood frequency effect at the early processing stages, examining whether orthographic neighbors with higher frequency exerted an influence on target processing especially at the phonological stage by using the event-related potential (ERP). Thirteen undergraduate students were recruited in this study, and they were required to covertly name Chinese characters with or without higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs); meanwhile, their brain activity was recorded. Results showed that the effect of neighborhood frequency was significant in frontocentral P2 amplitude, with a reduction for naming characters with HFNs compared to those without HFNs; while there was no effect in posterior N1 amplitude. The only neighborhood frequency effect in P2 component suggested a special role for the HFNs in phonological access of？？Chinese characters. The decrease in amplitude for naming with-HFN characters might be associated with the phonological interference of higher-frequency neighbors due to their different pronunciations from the target characters. 1. Introduction Once a single word is presented, its orthographically similar words are also partially activated. Coltheart first introduced the concept of orthographic neighborhood of a target word, defined as all words of the same length that can be generated by changing just one letter while preserving letter positions [1]. For example, cheap, chest, cleat, and wheat are all neighbors of cheat. Grainger and his colleagues pointed out that the printed frequency of a word’s orthographic neighbors played an important role in identification process of this target word, which is termed as neighborhood frequency effect [2]. The authors indicated that if the frequency of a target word was not the highest among its neighbors, those higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs) would compete with the target word and, consequently, slow down its processing. This inhibition was reported in several studies of lexical decision [2–8]. In naming tasks, no effect or a facilitatory trend of neighborhood frequency was observed [4, 9]. Grainger [4] gave an explanation to the absence of neighborhood interference based on the analogy theory of word naming [10, 11]. The pronunciations in alphabetic orthographic neighborhoods were of high consistency, a word usually sounded similar with its orthographic neighbors, and then the neighbors with higher frequency would provide support for the component phonology of the target word [4]. However, there is a close relationship between visual forms and pronunciations
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