The Effect of Semantic Neighborhood Density in Korean Visual Word Recognition

한국어 시각단어재인에서 의미 이웃크기 효과

The lexical decision task (LDT) commonly postulates the activation of semantic level. However, there are few studies for the feedback effect from semantic level. The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the feedback effect from semantic level is facilitatory or inhibitory in Korean LDT. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the number of phonological syllable neighbors (PSN) and the number of semantic neighbors (SEN) orthogonally while orthographic syllable neighbor (OSN) is dense. In the results, the significant facilitatory effect was shown in words with many SEN. In Experiment 2, we examined same conditions as Experiment 1 but OSN was sparse. Although the similar lexical decision latency pattern was shown, there was no statistical significance. These results can be explained by the feedback activation from semantic level. If a target has many SENs and many PSNs, it receives more feedback activation from semantic level than a target with few SENs and PSNs.