The proximate unit in the production of Korean words

Abstract

An important issue in recent psycholinguistic research is whether the first selectable phonological units in spoken-word production vary across languages. Data from many Indo-European languages demonstrate that word-onset phonemes are first selected in production planning, whereas whole syllables and CV morae are selected in native Chinese and Japanese, respectively. To empirically test the languagespecific view of proximate units, we investigate the roles of syllables and onset phonemes as proximate units in Korean, using a picture-naming task (Li et al. 2015). This is based on the fact that both syllables and phonemes are salient units in Korean phonological and orthographic structures. A significant priming effect was found for syllables, and a marginally significant effect for onset segments. These results indicate that in Korean, syllables function as proximate units in spoken-word production planning, but onset phonemes also show facilitation effects, albeit less robust ones than syllables. Our findings suggest that the functional phonological unit in spoken-word production is language dependent.