Abstract

Using the oddity judgment and classification tasks, five experiments examined the nature of visual organization of Korean Geulja which is composed of a vowel and consonants. Contrary to the predic­tions derived from Garner's (1978, 1981) work on grouping, Korean Geulja, structured by stimulus letters of heterogeneous dimensions, is well grouped and its emergent features facilitate the perception of component letters. This is more so in the case of a vowel letter. Results also show that this grouping is not affected by high-order cognitive processes. Selective attention to a component letter in a Geulja is easier than distributed attention to all components, suggesting that Korean Geulja is moderately grouped. Several factors affecting visual organization of Korean letters into a Geulja were found. The present results were discussed in comparison to previous studies on a selective attention approach to grouping.