Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the syllable transposition effect observed in Korean visual word recognitionalso occurs during sentence reading. Furthermore, another goal was to ascertain if the syllable transposition effect can be modulated by sentential context. To this end, we manipulated variables of the syllable conversion and the word predictability to examine eye movement measures for target nonwords with syllable conversion. Sixty subjects participated in the experiment, and their eye movements were recorded while reading. The results showed syllable transposition effects in the pattern of shorter fixation durations for the syllable-transposed nonwords than for the syllable-substituted nonwords in both gaze duration and regression path duration, and an interaction effect in which the syllable transposition effect was larger in the condition of greater word predictability. These results suggest the importance of syllable representation in Korean visual word recognition and imply that word recognition is influenced by sentence context.