• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-26
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the phonological information or the orthographic information plays a major role in visual word recognition. To do so, we used a non-word lexical decision task(LDT) in Experiment 1 and masked priming tasks in Experiement 2 and 3. The results of Experiment 1 showed that reaction times and the error rates were affected by the orthographic characteristics of the non-word stimuli such that orthographically similar non-words condition showed prolonged reaction times and higher error rates than control condition. In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, the participants performed masked priming lexical decision tasks in two SOA conditions(60ms, 150ms). The results of the both experiments showed that the orthographically identical first syllable priming facilitated lexical decision of the target words while both of the pseudo-homophone priming and the phonologically identical first syllable priming did not. The dual route hypothesis(Coltheart et al, 2001), assuming that orthographic information rather than phonological information is the major source for the visual word recognition processes, fits well with the results of the current study.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.193-220
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• 2018

Recent studies have demonstrated that word frequency, word length, neighborhood and word shape may have a role in visual word recognition. Shape information may affect word processing in different ways as Korean letter system works differently than that of English. The purpose of this study was to apply Gestalt's continuity principle to Korean alphabetic script(hangul), and to investigate the processing unit of hangul and to verify whether syllable shape affects word recognition in hangul. In experiment 1, three syllable words were utilized and two variables; 1) syllable types(horizontal syllable shape, e.g., "가". vertical syllable shape, e.g., "고") and 2) presenting direction (horizontal, vertical) were manipulated. Whereas "가" meets the criteria of Gestalt's continuity principle, "고" does not. Based on the result of lexical decision time, horizontal syllable shape type showed significant performance improvement, when compared to vertical syllable shape type, regardless of the presenting direction. In experiment 2, syllable types(horizontal syllable shape, vertical syllable shape) and the visual relationship between prime and target(identical, similar, different) were manipulated by using masked priming. There was a significant performance difference between the visual relationship of prime and target, and thus the effect of syllable shape was verified.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

This study investigated the lexical access processing of inflected Korean verbs in the mental lexicon. In Korean, verbs can be classified into two main types of inflections, which are regular and irregular inflections, which can be further divided into three types of regular inflections and two types of irregular inflections. A masked priming lexical decision task was used and the priming effects were compared. Experiments were carried out using the five different types of verbal inflections in Korean: (1) No change-regularity (regular verbs with no orthographical or phonological changes), (2) Phonological change-regularity (regular verbs with phonological changes to the stem only), (3) Orthographical change-regularity (regular verbs that only undergo orthographical changes), (4) Stem change-irregularity (the stem is omitted or alternated with the other phoneme of the stem in irregular verbs), (5) Ending change-irregularity (irregular verbs with changes in the endings by phoneme substitution). The first three types are regarded as regular verbal inflections whereas the latter two types are regarded as irregular verbal inflections. The infinitive forms of the verb were presented as target words and three different conditions were presented as prime words. The three conditions included regular verbal inflection, irregular verbal inflection, and a control condition in which morphologically and semantically unrelated primes were presented. In addition, different stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were manipulated (43ms, 72ms, 230ms) to examine the time frame of the morphological decomposition process in word recognition. The results revealed that there were significant priming effects in all three SOAs across conditions. Hence, there was no significant differences in priming effects between regular and irregular verbal inflection conditions. This may suggest that Korean verb processing does not adopt different processing routes for regular and irregular inflections, which can also be an indication of earlier morphological information processing for Korean verbs.