Abstract

Syllable plays an important role in Korean visual word recognition. Previous studies on syllable frequency effect have reported mixed results, which showed inhibitory effects in noun words while facilitative effects were shown in noun and verb Eojeols. Furthermore, most studies on Eojeols which reported facilitative effects of first syllable frequency employed correlation and regression approaches, which suggests the necessity of an experiment with factorial design. The present study carried out two lexical decision studies, employing noun Eojeols with 3 and 4 syllables in order to investigate the effects of first syllable frequency, controlling for Eojeol length, Eojeol frequency, and the number of meanings. High and low frequency of first syllable were compared in both experiments, while manipulating stem length. In Experiment 1, 3-syllable noun Eojeols were manipulated to have 1 or 2 stem length in syllables, while 4-syllable noun Eojeols were manipulated to have 2 or 3 stem length in syllables in Experiment 2. The results showed that facilitative effects of first syllable frequency regardless of stem length in lexical decision latencies and accuracy in both experiments. These results are in accordance with previous studies on Eojeol. To summarize, the present study was carried out to investigate syllable frequency effect in Eojeols while controlling other confounding factors, which showed robust facilitative effect of first syllable frequency irrelevant of Eojeol length, stem length, and Eojeol frequency. Therefore, the current results are discussed in terms of processing of Eojeol distinct from that of word.