Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of phonological and orthographic information during Korean visual word recognition by conducting a meta-analysis on previously published research results as well as a priming lexical decision task. First, we selected nine research articles (15 experiments) from the literature that reported effects of phonological and orthographic information of primes on target word recognition to calculate estimated effect sizes. Results showed a facilitative priming orthographically similar primes compared to unrelated control primes but a nonsignificant phonologically similar/identical primes. The priming study results also indicated that target words were responded to more rapidly when they were primed by orthographically similar nonwords than when they were primed by unrelated control nonwords, whereas there was no additional phonologically identical nonword primes. These results together support the view that orthographic information, but not phonological information, plays a primary role in Korean visual word recognition.