Abstract

Visual field differences in reading Chinese ideographs(Hanja) and Korean phonographs (Hangul) were investigated in a sample of biscriptual Korean graduate students. The equivalence of the Chinese and Korean graphemic units and the non-sequential nature of Hangul syllable arrangement made it possible to separate the confoundings of phonetic with sequential refffesentation and of ideographic with holistic patterns. Significant right visual field superiorities were found both for single Hangul syllables and two-syllable Hangul words, while there were no significant visual field differences either for single Hanja characters or two-character Hanja words. The results suggest that the phonographic nature of the stimuli, not sequencing, may suffice to produce a right visual field superiority.