Korean Visual Word Recognition Research Articles

Effects of age and word frequency on Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from a web-based large-scale lexical-decision task.

The present study examined age differences in word-frequency effects in Korean visual word recognition through a large-scale, web-based lexical-decision task. Four hundred ninety-seven adult Korean speakers in their 20s through 60s participated in the task, in which they decided the lexicality of 120 Korean words varying in frequency and 120 nonwords. Overall, both lexical-decision accuracy and response times increased with age, and more frequent words were recognized more rapidly than less frequent words. We also found significant effects of participants' reading skill as well as age of acquisition of words. Crucially, despite older adults' generally slower reaction times, there was no hint of any interaction between participant age and word frequency on lexical-decision times. This result adds to the literature on age-related changes in visual word recognition and provides evidence for stable word-frequency effect across the adult age spectrum. These findings are discussed with different hypotheses of lexical access and aging proposed in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotionality effects in Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from lab-based and web-based lexical decision tasks

Previous studies have shown that processes of word recognition are influenced by the emotional content of a word. This pattern is most readily explained by the motivated attention and affective states model (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997), which states that emotional stimuli are motivationally significant and capture attention. Drawing on this theoretical account, the current study compared lexical decision response times to positive and negative emotion words versus neutral words across two experimental environments - a traditional lab-based environment and a web-based environment. In addition, the experiment was conducted using Korean words presented to native Korean speakers in order to test whether the emotionality effect emerges in a non-English language. The results revealed faster response times to emotion words versus neutral words across both experimental environments with no evidence of a difference between the two environments. These findings provide important evidence that emotion words successfully attract attention and facilitate word processing even in situations where participants might be more easily distracted than they would be in a traditional lab setting. This work also constitutes the first demonstration of an emotionality effect in Korean word recognition, thus providing further evidence that the emotionality effect may be a language-universal phenomenon.

한글 시각 단어재인 시의 동음이의어 이득 효과: 어휘판단과제로부터의 증거

The purpose of this study is to examine how homonyms are processed in Korean visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, forty homonyms with unbalanced meaning dominance, 40 control words with a single meaning, and 80 nonwords were selected. Participants conducted a lexical decision task, in which they were asked to decide the lexicality of the letter strings and respond as rapidly as possible without any sacrifice of accuracy. The results showed that homonyms responded faster than monosemic words. In Experiment 2, a consistent pattern of results with those of Experiment 1 was found when homonyms with balanced meaning dominance were used. These results suggest that ambiguous word advantage should be observed in Korean visual word recognition. Theoretical models of visual word recognition were discussed regarding the ambiguous word advantage in visual word recognition.

The Review of Syllable Frequency Effect in Korean Visual Word Recognition

The Review of Syllable Frequency Effect in Korean Visual Word Recognition

The Time Course of Activation of Semantic and Orthographic Information in Morphological Decomposition by Korean Adults and Developing Readers

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.

Temporal locus of phonological information processing during Korean visual word recognition: ERP evidence of the irregular words

Temporal locus of phonological information processing during Korean visual word recognition: ERP evidence of the irregular words

한국어 시각단어 재인시 형태소와 표기 정보의 영향

한국어 시각단어 재인시 형태소와 표기 정보의 영향

Early Effect of Phonological Information in Korean Visual Word Recognition: An ERP Investigation with Transposed Letters.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological information on visual word recognition by using letter transposition effects. The Korean writing system gives a unique opportunity to investigate such phenomenon since the transposition of the beginning consonant (onset) and the end consonant (coda) of a certain syllable allows one to keep the coda phonology constant while changing the written alphabetic characters. In this study, 23 participants' ERPs to such transposition cases were compared with the ERPs to cases that do not maintain coda phonology while the participants were performing a go/no-go lexical decision task for visually presented letter strings. The results of the current study showed that transposed materials with original phonological information produce less N250 than both the baseline condition and the transposed materials with different phonological information condition. The results suggest that phonological information is used early in the lexical process in Korean and early orthographic processing is influenced by the characteristics of the grapheme to phoneme conversion process.

Temporal Locus of the Influence of Phonological Information during Korean Visual Word Recognition : Event-Related Potential Evidences of Homophone

Temporal Locus of the Influence of Phonological Information during Korean Visual Word Recognition : Event-Related Potential Evidences of Homophone

THE INFLUENCE OF SYLLABIFICATION RULES IN L1 ON L2 WORD RECOGNITION.

Experiments with Korean learners of English and English monolinguals were conducted to examine whether knowledge of syllabification in the native language (Korean) affects the recognition of printed words in the non-native language (English). Another purpose of this study was to test whether syllables are the processing unit in Korean visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, 26 native Korean speakers and 19 native English speakers participated. In Experiment 2, 40 native Korean speakers participated. In two experiments, syllable length was manipulated based on the Korean syllabification rule and the participants performed a lexical decision task. Analyses of variance were performed for the lexical decision latencies and error rates in two experiments. The results from Korean learners of English showed that two-syllable words based on the Korean syllabification rule were recognized faster as words than various types of three-syllable words, suggesting that Korean learners of English exploited their L1 phonological knowledge in recognizing English words. The results of the current study also support the idea that syllables are a processing unit of Korean visual word recognition.

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

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.

Nonselective access of English phonology in bi-scriptal Chinese–Korean visual word recognition

This study investigated the phonological processes with bilingual readers of Korean and Chinese. Three types of same-different matching between the prime and target were compared. The critical point was on whether the phonological information of English was activated automatically in a semantic judgment task involving only Korean and Chinese. The results showed that the latency of the conditions (S+P-, S-P- and S-P+) was significantly different; latencies in the S-P+ condition where there is no semantic but with phonological relations were slower than in the S-P- condition where there are neither semantic nor phonological relations. The implication for phonological recoding was discussed.

A computational model explaining language phenomena on Korean visual word recognition

How do we understand the meaning of written word? Until recently, the basic mechanisms underlying visual word recognition have remained controversial. To explore the basic mechanisms underlying the human recognition processes, we propose the computational model of visual word recognition which reflects the theoretically presented linguistic processing mechanisms of Korean’s visual word processing. In applying the computational model, sets of orthographic units, hidden units, context units and semantic units, were constructed. During the training phase, the weight on the connections between the units were modified using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model using a lexical decision response time was substituted by a cross entropy values. To evaluate the model, we also conducted behavioral experiments to compare the results of the model performance with human performances. The results show that the proposed model closely simulates Korean visual word processing characteristics such as the word frequency effect, the lexical status effect, the word similarity effect and the semantic priming effect. The model suggests that the computational models should be a valuable tool that can explain the lexical information processing characteristics of the Korean visual word recognition.

The Relationship Between Morphological Family Size and Syllabic Neighborhoods Density in Korean Visual Word Recognition

The Relationship Between Morphological Family Size and Syllabic Neighborhoods Density in Korean Visual Word Recognition