• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.303-323
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• 2016

The present study aims to investigate how differences in terms of morphological awareness (MA) influence the learning of new words in young adults. Divided into two groups according to their MA, participants were asked to learn the meanings of rare Hanja words in both morphologically supported and unsupported sentence contexts. The results indicate that high-MA participants were more successful in learning the meanings of the words than the low-MA participants and that the group difference lasted for one week after learning. More importantly, the effect of MA was greater for rare words appearing within morphological supported sentences. These results suggest that both the availability of morphological analyses during learning and individual differences in MA influence the learning of word meanings.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.421-439
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• 2016

The present study investigates the effects of semantic transparency on the learning of new words using both behavioral measures and event-related brain potentials. Participants studied novel words with either semantically transparent or opaque definitions while their brain potentials were recorded. Learning performance was assessed with both a lexical decision task and a recall test. The results indicated that transparent novel words were easier to learn than opaque words. More specifically, self-paced learning times were shorter for transparent novel words across three study sessions. Transparent words also elicited reduced N400s compared with opaque words in all sessions. Moreover, lexical decisions to both learned novel words and real words were faster and more accurate within the transparent condition compared to the opaque condition. These results suggest that semantic transparency also plays an important role within word learning, just as within word recognition, further supporting the notion that morphological information is critical within lexical processing.