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Lexical properties influencing visual word recognition in Hangul

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Abstract

This study examined how lexical properties, such as word frequency, word length, and morphological features, affect the word recognition of Korean Hangul among adult readers. Ninety-four native Korean students performed a lexical decision task on disyllabic and trisyllabic words and nonwords. Results of cross-classified and hierarchical linear modeling showed a significant frequency effect but null effects of word length and their interactions on word recognition. The null syllable effect might be contributable to the block structure of syllables, which does not require syllabic decomposition in recognition. Given that Chinese-derived Sino-Korean words account for about 70% of the Korean lexicon, morphological features embedded in the word were examined in order to further understand the morphological undercurrent of multisyllabic word recognition. Word type (bound-morphemic words vs. compound words), word origin (native or semi-native words vs. Chinese-derived words), and morphemic transparency (opaque morpheme vs. transparent morpheme) were significant predictors of the speed of visual word recognition. An analysis of frequency split showed that compound words and morpheme transparency facilitated word recognition for high frequency words, while the number of morphemes within the word, Korean native and semi-native words, and morphemic transparency facilitated word recognition for low frequency words. These results suggest that high and low frequency words function differently according to morphological information available within the multisyllabic word in visual word recognition in Hangul.

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Notes

  1. Although this study examined lexical decision data, a small number of studies reporting naming data was reviewed in this article only when naming data were presented in comparison to lexical decision data in the studies reviewed. In addition, the literature review is based on adult data because children’s reading is still in the (transient) developmental stage, as Beyersmann, Castles, and Coltheart (2012) indicate that reading automization does not appear until a relatively late stage in reading development.

  2. In this article, curly brackets {} are used for orthographic representations and angle brackets < > for semantic explanations.

  3. The word frequency measure, based on a corpus of three million words that were published in print materials since 1990, includes frequencies of segments (i.e., consonants and vowels), syllables, words, particles, suffixes, and phrases.

  4. The determination of the morphological properties of the stimuli was complicated to some degree. Some Korean words have a mixture of a native Korean word and a Sino-Korean word; for example, The word {강물} <river (water)> has one Chinese-origin syllable {강} <river> and another native one-syllable word {물} <water> in the first and the second position, respectively. We classified the mixture of a Korean morpheme and a Sino-Korean morpheme as a semi-Korean word because the focus of the classification was whether the word was of Chinese-origin or not in order to tease apart the role of morphological information.

  5. To be consistent with the coding scheme for the determination of the word origin, the mixture of an opaque and a transparent morpheme was considered opaque because the purpose of the study was to examine the role of clear morphological information.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Republic of Korean’s Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A5A2A03927124).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Cincinnati, 615R Teachers-Dyer Complex, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0022, USA

    Hye K. Pae

  2. Department of Psychology, Yeungnam University, 280 Daehak-Ro, Gyeongsan, 38541, Gyeongbuk, Korea

    Sungbong Bae & Kwangoh Yi

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  1. Hye K. Pae
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  2. Sungbong Bae
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Correspondence to Hye K. Pae or Kwangoh Yi.

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Pae, H.K., Bae, S. & Yi, K. Lexical properties influencing visual word recognition in Hangul. Read Writ 33, 2391–2412 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10042-4

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