No Flexibility in Letter Position Coding in Korean

초록

Substantial research across Indo-European languages suggests that readers display a degree of uncertainty in letter position coding. For example, readers perceive transposed-letter stimuli, such as jugde, as similar to their base words (e.g., judge). However, tolerance to disruptions of letter order is not apparent in all languages, suggesting that critical aspects of the writing system may shape the nature of position coding. We investigated readers' tolerance to these disruptions in Korean, a writing system characterized by a high degree of orthographic confusability. Results of three Korean masked priming experiments revealed robust identity priming effects, but no indication of priming due to shared letters or syllables in different positions. Two further masked priming experiments revealed where the Korean findings deviate from English. These results support the claim that the nature of the writing system influences the precision of orthographic representations used in reading.

키워드