Comparative Analysis of Networks of Phonologically Similar Words in English and Spanish

Previous network analyses of several languages revealed a unique set of structural characteristics. One of these characteristics—the presence of many smaller components (referred to as islands)—was further examined with a comparative analysis of the island constituents. The results showed that Spanish words in the islands tended to be phonologically and semantically similar to each other, but English words in the islands tended only to be phonologically similar to each other. The results of this analysis yielded hypotheses about language processing that can be tested with psycholinguistic experiments, and offer insight into cross-language differences in processing that have been previously observed.