• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.25-54
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• 2020

While there is no evidence for parafoveal processing in alphabetic languages such as English and Finnish, there is some evidence that morphological information is processed in syllabic languages like Chinese. Korean writing system, Hangul, would be able to provide morphological preview benefit effects since it is an "alphabetic syllabary" which contains both alphabetic and syllabic features. This study explored morphological parafoveal preview benefit effects during reading Korean using irregular verbs, which have phonological and orthographical differences between fundamental and conjugated forms. In the Experiment, the target word was irregular conjugated form, and there were four preview conditions: identical (e.g. 구워), fundamental form (e.g. 굽다), orthographically related (e.g. 굼다), and unrelated control (e.g. 죨어). In the result of study, identical was shortest and morphological, orthographical, unrelated preview were followed. Moreover, measures of first-pass reading of morphological preview were significantly shorter than those of unrelated control preview. This results support the hypothesis of morphological preview benefit effects in Korean. The implications of the results are discussed.