Abstract

The current investigation sought to examine the potential influence of alerting, which pertains to the level of readiness to receive information, on the representation and visual recognition processing of Korean Eojeols in the mental lexicon, and whether these effects vary at the individual level. Words in Korean consist of two or more morphemes, and three information-processing hypotheses have been proposed: the decomposition hypothesis, which suggests that each morpheme that makes up a word is stored and processed independently in the mental lexicon; the full-list hypothesis, which suggests that the entire word itself is represented in the mental lexicon and processed; and the hybrid hypothesis, which suggests that both the decomposition and full-list hypotheses can be followed. To explore these hypotheses, a representative method is to investigate frequency effects in behavior responses during lexical decision tasks, which depend on whether Eojeol frequency or root frequency has a significant effect, and can support one of the information processing hypotheses. We hypothesized that individuals with higher levels of alerting would exhibit effective attentional allocation, which could facilitate the segmentation of Eojeol roots and postpositions, consistent with the decomposition hypothesis. To address this research question, both an attentional network task and an Eojeol decision task were administered. The findings revealed that the frequency of Eojeol roots exhibited a facilitative effect on Eojeol decision times exclusively among individuals with higher levels of alerting. As such, this study suggests that individual differences in alerting may be associated with the units of representation and processing in Korean Eojeols, thereby supporting a hybrid hypothesis in the processing of these linguistic units.