Abstract

The present study examined the role of orthographic and phonological information for Koreans and Americans in recognizing written English words using the primed-lexical decision task. It is well known that the phonological and orthographic form priming occurs when recognizing words of one's native language. Many previous studies have shown that this form-priming effect occurs because the phonological and orthographic similarity between the prime and target strings affects the processing of the targets at the pre-lexical or lexical access stage. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether the form priming effect found in the native language is exhibited when recognizing foreign language words, and to examine whether this kind of form priming is due to the phonological or orthographic similarity. In Experiment 1, non-word primes were presented, and in order to manipulate the relationship between the prime and target letter strings there were 3 conditions; the phonologically similar, orthographically similar, and unrelated conditions. For Americans, both phonological and orthographic similarity facilitated the target word processing at 100msec SOA, whereas at 1000msec SOA only phonological similarity facilitated recognition of target words. However, in the case of Koreans, only at KXlmsec SOA, only the orthographic similarity facilitated target word recognition. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that Korean readers do not use the phonological information in recognizing English words. In Experiment 2, the prime words were used to examine word form-related processing at the lexical level. American subjects showed inhibitory effects on target word recognition by the phonological and orthographic similarity between the primes and targets at short SOA, whereas Korean subjects revealed a significant inhibitory priming effect by the orthographic similarity and exhibited a facilitatory trend by the phonological similarity at the 100msec SOA. The faults of Experiment 2 imply that Koreans do not use the orthographic information for lexical access in English word recognition and they do not actively use the pre-lexical phonological information. In conclusion, Korean students do not actively use phonology-related information at the pre-lexical and lexical levels for recognizing English words, and they recognize English words mainly by utilizing orthographic information.