Abstract
The current study examined the involvement of semantic and orthographic information in the processing of derived words in Korean Hangul. Sixth grade children and adults participated in four masked priming lexical decision experiments in which the prime duration varied from 36, 48, 57, and 72ms (in Experiments, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively). Morphological (M), semantic (S), and orthographic (O) relatedness between prime-target pairs were manipulated. There were four types of Korean prime-target pairs: (1) -M-S+O: 도시락-도시, scandal-scan, (2) +M-S+O: 구두쇠-구두, archer-arch, (3) +M+S+O: 음악가-음악, bravely-brave, and (4) -M+S-O: 반대-이의, accuse-blame. There were several key findings: (1) adults showed significant priming effects at 57 and 72ms in +M+S+O and significant priming effects at 72 ms in +M-S+O; (2) less skilled readers showed significant facilitation at 36ms in +M+S+O; and (3) in -M-S+O, both skilled and less skilled readers show significant inhibition across four prime durations. The different time course of +M+S+O priming for adults and children may be due to developing readers’ smaller lexicon and less competition for semantic activation of the monosyllabic suffix (e.g., 가 in 음악가), which is a homograph in Korean Hangul. The consistent orthographic inhibition for both age groups suggest that orthographic information is activated early and continues to play an important role throughout the course of Korean visual word recognition. The current study extends previous research with readers of Roman alphabets to readers of an alpha-syllabary orthography written in a nonlinear spatial layout with more clear-cut syllable boundaries. Taken together, it appears that the involvement of semantic and orthographic information in the decomposition of morphologically complex word may vary depending on the characteristics of the orthography.
Highlights
There are two main theoretical approaches to explain how morphologically complex words are represented and processed
Grade 6 children showed a significant inhibitive priming effect in -M-S+O at 36 ms (−6.8%, p = 0.011) while adults showed a marginally significant inhibitive priming effect in -M-S+O (−4%, p = 0.07). These results suggest that morphological decomposition for semantically related and orthographically overlapped primes
Results showed significant morphological priming effects for sixth graders at 36 ms and for skilled readers at 57 ms, suggesting that morphological decomposition arises earlier for less skilled readers, probably due to their smaller lexicon and less competition for semantic activation for the monosyllabic suffix, which is a homograph in the Hangul orthography
Summary
There are two main theoretical approaches to explain how morphologically complex words are represented and processed. The learned internal representations develop to the extent of semantic overlap between stem and whole word. Pseudo-affixed words (e.g., corner) or semantically opaque complex words (e.g., witness) have representations that are different from those of their stems in these models. This approach would predict that only semantically transparent complex words are decomposed and able to activate the representations of the stems
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