Rapid orthographic and delayed phonological processing: ERP and oscillatory evidence from masked priming in Korean

초록

A central question in visual word recognition concerns whether orthographic and phonological codes are coordinated sequentially or in parallel during lexical access. Korean Hangul, an alpha-syllabic writing system with morphophonemic spelling principles, allows independent manipulation of orthographic and phonological syllable overlap. In a masked priming lexical decision task with EEG (N= 30), we contrasted orthographically identical primes (e.g., (sic)-$k),phonologicallyoverlappingprimes(e.g.,o-$k), and unrelated primes. Event-related potentials and time-frequency representations (theta: 4-8 Hz, lower beta: 13-20 Hz, upper beta: 20-30 Hz) were analyzed to capture both evoked and oscillatory neural dynamics. Orthographic priming produced a cascade of facilitative effects: early fronto-central P200 enhancement (150-250 msec) with upper beta synchronization (30 -290 msec), followed by centro-parietal N400 reduction (350-550 msec) with frontal theta suppression (400-730 msec), and behavioral facilitation. Phonological priming, by contrast, elicited an inhibitory behavioral effect and sustained lower beta activity over central regions (310-590 msec) but produced no early electrophysiological modulation, consistent with lexical competition. This spatiotemporal dissociation suggests that orthographic syllable processing can emerge at early stages and cascades into later lexical-level processing, whereas phonological syllable effects are confined to later processing stages. These findings provide support for a sequential or cascaded account of orthographicphonological coordination, as predicted by dual-route models, while challenging strong forms of parallel activation, and suggest that the alpha-syllabic structure of Korean may enable a processing strategy in which orthographic parsing serves as an efficient entry route to the lexicon. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC

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