Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the role of phonological information in Hangul word recognition manipulating frequency of words in a semantic categorization task. Stimuli used in the first 2 experiments were two syllable words, and exemplars and target words were different in the final consonant of the second syllable in Exp 1 and in the final consonant of the first syllable in Exp2. Exp 1 showed the results that subjects made more errors on low frequency target words and took longer times on high frequency exemplars than on controls. In Exp 2 subjects took longer times at the condition of high frequency examplars and low frequency targets than at a control condition. Exp 3 used pseudo-homophones of exemplars as targets, and found that subjects made more errors on both of high and low frequency exemplars and took longer times on high frequency exemplars than on controls. These results support the predictions of dual process models(e.g., Jared & Seidenberg, 1991) and suggest that the use of phonological and visual information depends on word frequency. That is, low frequency words are recognized by phonological route, but high frequency words by direct visual route.