The neighborhood size and frequency effect in Korean words

한국어 단어재인에서 나타나는 이웃효과

This paper examined two hypotheses. Firstly, if the first syllable of word play an important role in visual word recognition, it may be the unit of word neighbor. Secondly, if the first syllable is the unit of lexical access, the neighborhood size effect and the neighborhood frequency effect would appear in a lexical decision task and a form primed lexical decision task. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 showed that words had large neighbors made a inhibitory effect in the LDT(lexical decision task). Experiment 2 showed the interaction between the neighborhood frequency effectand the word form similarity in the form primed LDT. We concluded that the first syllable in Korean words might be the unit of word neighborhood and play a central role in a lexical access.