The lexical inhibition of the phonological information in Korean visual word recognition

Abstract

Two Experiments using a primed lexical decision task investigated what types of linguistic information elicits lexical inhibition during visual word recognition of Korean. We measured participants’ reaction times for this task and three prime-target conditions were used: 1) orthographically related 2) phonologically related and 3) control condition. We attempted to examine how lexical competition occurs when prime words had phonological change and whether the inhibition is modulated by word frequency of prime words (Experiment 1), and investigate whether the lexical competition is modulated by lexical status of the prime stimuli (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we showed that the reaction times were slower in the phonologically related condition as compared to the control condition, whereas they were faster in the orthographically related condition relative to the control condition. Moreover, this tendency was more noticeable in the low frequency prime condition relative to the high frequency prime condition. However, neither the inhibitory effect by the phonologically related prime nor the facilitative effect of the orthographically related prime were observed in Experiment 2 in which nonword primes were used, suggesting that the inhibitory priming effect is generated due to lexical competition between the prime and the target within a lexical level, not via a pre-lexical level in Korean visual word recognition.