Experimental Evidence
Much evidence in favor of the cohort model has come from priming studies, in which a "priming word" is presented to a subject and then closely followed by a "target word" and the subject asked to identify if the target word is a real word or not; the theory behind the priming paradigm is that if a word is activated in the subject's mental lexicon, the subject will be able to respond more quickly to the target word. If the subject does respond more quickly, the target word is said to be "primed" by the priming word. Several priming studies have found that when a stimulus that does not reach recognition point is presented, numerous words targets were all primed, whereas if a stimulus past recognition point is presented, only one word is primed. For example, in Pienie Zwitserlood's study of Dutch compared the words kapitein ("captain") and kapitaal ("capital" or "money"); in the study, the stem kapit- primed both boot ("boat," semantically related to kapitein) and geld ("gold," semantically related to kapitaal), suggesting that both lexical entries were activated; the full word kapitein, on the other hand, primed only boot and not geld. Furthermore, experiments have shown that in tasks where subjects must differentiate between words and non-words, reaction times were faster for longer words with phonemic points of discrimination where earlier in the word. For example, discriminating between Crocodile and Dial, the point of recognition to discriminate between the two words comes at the /d/ in crocodile which is much earlier than the /l/ sound in Dial.
Later experiments refined the model. For example, some studies showed that "shadowers" (subjects who listen to auditory stimuli and repeat it as quickly as possible) could not shadow as quickly when words were jumbled up so they didn't mean anything; those results suggested that sentence structure and speech context also contribute to the process of activation and selection.
Research in bilinguals has found that word recognition is influenced by the number of neighbors in both languages.
Read more about this topic: Cohort Model
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