Kim, S. Y. & Wang, M.
Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
As an alphabetic syllabary, the syllable unit in Korean Hangul orthography is visually salient. In many cases, the syllable also corresponds to a morphemic unit in derived words. The present study addressed the question whether the distinct syllable boundary in Korean plays a role in morphological decomposition dependent upon the different types of affixed words (i.e., prefixed words vs. suffixed words). Native Korean adults participated in one of two experiments using a masked priming lexical decision task with a short prime duration (47ms). In Experiment 1, participants were given prefixed words (e.g., 비현실, “unreal” in English), non-morphological pseudowords (e.g., 서현실 "tanreal" in English), and unrelated words (e.g., 몰이해 “misunderstand” in English) as the primes and the corresponding stem as the target (e.g., 현실 “real” in English). In Experiment 2, the primes were suffixed words (e.g., 현실감 “reality” in English) and non-morphological pseudowords (e.g., 현실먹 "realdal" in English) and the target was their corresponding stem (i.e., 현실). The stems of the critical items were same in both experiments. Reaction times for the targets were significantly faster when it was preceded by either prefixed words or suffixed words in comparison to the corresponding non-morphological pseudowords. In both experiments, there was no significant difference in priming effects of the non-morphological pseudowords on the targets as compared to the unrelated primes. There was also no significant difference in the priming effects when comparing the prefixed and suffixed words. These results suggest that it is the morphological structure, but not the syllable boundary that determines morphological decomposition in Korean. Furthermore, different types of affixed words are processed in a similar fashion. On-going three more experiments further examine the effects of lexicality and interpretability of the complex words using derived pseudowords as the primes (e.g., 반현실 and 현실계, for interpretable; 최현실 and 현실채 for non-interpretable cases).