Can the Discriminative Lexicon Model account for the family size effect in auditory word recognition?

Abstract Words with larger morphological families elicit shorter response times (RTs) in lexical decision experiments (e.g., Bertram et al. 2000 ). One possible account for this family size (FS) effect draws on the Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM; Chuang & Baayen 2021 ), positing that morphological family members strengthen relationships between forms and meanings. While it has been shown that the DLM successfully explains FS effects in reading ( Mulder et al. 2014 ), we investigated whether it does so in listening too. We trained the computational model LDL-AURIS ( Shafaei-Bajestan et al. 2023 ), which implements the DLM, on Dutch and show that a measure derived from LDL-AURIS accounts for variance in auditory lexical decision RTs in Dutch, and also partially accounts for the same variance in the RTs as the auditory FS effect. Future research should investigate whether some other measure derived from the DLM can fully explain FS effects in listening.