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Processing of the Korean Eojoel Ambiguity

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Abstract

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. In experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, we examined how readers resolve the Eojoel ambiguity, where the grouping of syllables is ambiguous with respect to whether a phrase-final syllable is a case marker or a part of a word. This Eojoel ambiguity offers an opportunity to test how relative frequency of the lexical entries and complexity of morphological decomposition affect ambiguity resolution. Overall, the results of the experiments presented here showed that readers noticed and processed the Eojoel ambiguity very rapidly using information about the relative frequency of alternative interpretations, while the complexity of the morphological decomposition had little effect. These results are discussed in terms of constraint-based accounts (MacDonald et al. Psychol Rev 101:676–703, 1994) of ambiguity resolution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Daegu, Daegu, South Korea

    Yoonhyoung Lee

  2. Department of Psychology, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

    Kichun Nam

  3. Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 3270, Davie Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3270, USA

    Peter C. Gordon

Authors
  1. Yoonhyoung Lee
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  2. Kichun Nam
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  3. Peter C. Gordon
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Correspondence to Peter C. Gordon.

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Lee, Y., Nam, K. & Gordon, P.C. Processing of the Korean Eojoel Ambiguity. J Psycholinguist Res 38, 345–362 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-008-9093-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-008-9093-z

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