한국어 단음절 단어의 시각 재인에서 음절빈도효과

Abstract

In a series of experiments, Korean monosyllabic words were used to investigate the role of syllables in Korean visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, lexical decision task was performed and the reaction time for high word frequency-high syllable frequency word condition was faster than those obtained from low word frequency-high syllable frequency word condition, with low word frequency-low syllable frequency condition being the slowest. Hence, visual word recognition was faster for high-frequency words than low-frequency words. Moreover, visual word recognition was faster for words that had higher syllable-frequency compared to words with lower syllable-frequency in words with similar word-frequency. In Experiment 2, word naming task was used to examine whether the syllable-frequency effect observed in Experiment 1 was task-specific or task-independent. Experiment 2 failed to show such word-frequency effect observed in Experiment 1 which may indicate that monosyllabic word-frequency effect is task-specific, and that word naming of monosyllabic Korean words could still be possible without lexical access. Although syllable-frequency effect was statistically significant as in Experiment 1, its effect size was prominently reduced in Experiment 2. Hence, these results demonstrate that syllable-frequency effect is concerned with the visual word processing that is common in both lexical decision and word naming tasks. The results from this study show that syllable plays a crucial role in visual word recognition of Korean monosyllabic words, and that syllable-frequency effect occurs at an independent information processing stage that is readily distinguishable from word-frequency effect.