Masked transposition priming effects are observed in Korean in the same-different task.

Chang H Lee,Clare Lally,Kathleen Rastle

doi:10.1177/1747021821997336

Abstract

Research suggests that readers of Korean Hangul demonstrate precise orthographic coding. In contrast to findings from many other languages, the identification of Hangul words is not speeded by prior masked presentation of transposition primes relative to substitution primes. The present studies asked whether evidence for precise orthographic coding is also observed in the same–different task—a task claimed to reflect pre-lexical orthographic representations. Experiments tested whether masked transposed-letter (Experiment 1) or transposed-syllable-block (Experiment 2) primes facilitate judgements about whether a target matches a reference stimulus. In contrast to previous results using lexical decision, significant transposition effects were observed in both cases. These findings add weight to the proposition that apparent differences across writing systems in the precision of orthographic coding may reflect demands of the word identification process rather than properties of orthographic representations themselves.

Highlights

The recognition of printed words requires analysis of letter identity and letter position
Lerner et al (2014) operationalised this proposal more generally in terms of the prevalence of anagrams in known orthographic forms. They developed a series of computational models demonstrating that reliance on positional information emerges more strongly when training sets have a high proportion of anagrams
Laboratory experiments in which adults learned to read in artificial writing systems designed to have many anagrams or none were consistent with this pattern (Lally et al, 2020)

Summary

Introduction

The recognition of printed words requires analysis of letter identity and letter position. Velan and Frost (2007, 2009, 2011) published a series of studies demonstrating that Hebrew readers appear to be much less tolerant to letter transpositions than would be expected in other languages such as English They made the case that the extreme rigidity of Hebrew letter position coding derives from the importance of the tri-consonantal root structure in word identification. Laboratory experiments in which adults learned to read in artificial writing systems designed to have many anagrams or none were consistent with this pattern (Lally et al, 2020) These studies suggest that the rigidity or flexibility of position coding may not be tied to specific morphological structures but may instead be a consequence of the orthographic density of a writing system (Frost, 2012)

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Conclusion