Beyond visual similarity: Reversal-related masked priming in Korean Hangul

초록

Reading requires precise encoding of letter identity to discriminate visually similar but orthographically distinct letter forms. We examined whether reversal-related alternatives (e.g., b and d) are more disruptive than other visually similar alternatives and whether any disadvantage differs between lateral and vertical reversal orientations. We conducted four masked priming experiments in Korean Hangul that examined lateral (e.g., (sic)/(sic)) and vertical (e.g., (sic)/(sic)) reversal-related primes in lexical decision, alphabetic decision, and same-different matching tasks, using stroke-deletion and stroke-addition controls and, in the final experiment, a visually dissimilar baseline. In the lexical decision task, reversal-related primes were more disruptive than both controls. The alphabetic decision task showed the same pattern relative to both visually similar controls, again with little evidence that these contrasts differed between orientations. In the same-different matching task, the disadvantage was larger for vertical than lateral pairs and, relative to the visually dissimilar baseline, remained for vertical but not lateral pairs. These findings extend the reversal-related disadvantage previously observed in Roman script to letter and word recognition in Hangul and show that reversal-related and visually similar singlestroke alternatives are not equivalent during Hangul word recognition. Thus, models of visual word recognition must distinguish reversal-related alternatives from visually similar alternatives formed by stroke deletion or addition.

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