Abstract

An important issue in reading research concerns the role of phonology in word recognition. While some authors believe that phonology plays a minor role in word recognition, others believe that word recognition is always mediated by its phonology. Using Korean words, the present study examined the possibility of phonological mediation in lexical access. Experiment 1 examined whether pseudohomophone primes (eg. 나겹) facilitate recognition of their semantic associatives (eg. 가을) as much as their real word counter parts (eg. 낙엽) do in a lexical decision task. The result showed a marginally significant pseudohomophone priming effect, and its magnitude was smaller than that of real word priming effect. Experiment 2 explored homophone's negative effect. After presenting each pair of words, subjects were asked to decide whether they were semantically related. One word of each pair had the same phonology as the word associated semantically with the other word of the pair (eg. 가치-함께; 같이-쓸모). The rate of false positive responses was significantly higher than their visual controls (eg. 갈이-함께; 가지-함께). Taken together, these results indicate that phonology plays some, but not dominant, role in Hangul word recognition.