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Korean has visually salient syllable units that are often mapped onto either prefixes or suffixes in derived words. In addition, prefixed and suffixed words may be processed differently given a left-to-right parsing procedure and the need to resolve morphemic ambiguity in prefixes in Korean. To test this hypothesis, four experiments using the masked priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted. Results showed that suffixed primes facilitated responses to their stem targets regardless of the lexicality or interpretability of the primes. In contrast, prefixed primes had a significant effect only when they were real words, and not when they were either interpretable or noninterpretable prefixed pseudowords. These results suggest that there may be two different processing mechanisms for derived words in Korean. One is prelexical morphological decomposition for suffixed words, and the other is the supralexical analysis for prefixed words where decomposition occurs only after the whole word has been accessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., nakpin, semron). The difficulty in responding to such “TL” nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower when the medial consonants of the baseword formed a complex coda (e.g., the rm of sermon) than when they comprised a separate coda and onset (e.g., the p and k of napkin). The same result was shown in false positive responses to nonwords when their visibility was degraded through masking. In addition, these TL effects were just as strong for nonwords like nakpin as they were for nonwords whose medial consonants formed a complex coda like warlus, but whose baseword was syllabified between those consonants (e.g., the l and r of walrus). Such findings are a challenge for most current models of letter position assignment. Instead, they can be explained by an account where bisyllabic words are stored in lexical memory with a structure that maximizes the coda of the first syllable and where medial consonants are tried out in all viable subsyllabic slots. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Korean subsyllabic structure was investigated by observing the pattern of responses arising from letter transpositions within a syllable in the Hangul script. Experiment 1 revealed no confusions when the onset and coda of one syllable of a disyllabic word were transposed. This was also the case in Experiment 2, where the transposition took place within a syllable having a coda composed of two consonants. However, confusion with the baseword was observed when the two consonants within the complex coda were themselves transposed. These results are taken to support the view that Hangul (and possibly all concatenating orthographic scripts) is processed based on its onset, vowel, and coda structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: When two consonants within an English word were transposed to create a nonword, difficulty in lexical decision responses to that nonword was revealed, most strongly when the coda of the first syllable was exchanged with the onset of the second (e.g., nakpin derived from napkin), but also when onsets were exchanged between syllables (e.g., kapnin) as well as codas (e.g., nankip). The latter findings are incompatible with current models of letter processing. Moreover, such transposed letter (TL) effects were shown to be considerably reduced in Hangul, the alphabetic script used in Korean. Because Hangul physically demarcates the onset and coda positions for every consonant, it is argued that it is ambiguity in assignment of a consonant to an onset or coda slot that leads to the TL effect in a linear script such as English. Such a conclusion implies that models of letter processing should incorporate the involvement of subsyllabic structure, something that is currently lacking. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The way in which adult readers process the internal orthographic structure of words was examined in two languages that differ in their syllabic structure, English and Spanish. Readers of both languages were presented with polysyllabic words split according to either their pronounced syllable (e.g., cac tus) or their maximized initial unit corresponding to their Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS, e.g., cact us). In agreement with other recent research, it was found that speed of lexical decision to syllabically split words was faster than to BOSS split words for poorer English speakers, while better English speakers were more oriented toward the BOSS. The Spanish data suggested an overall syllable bias regardless of reading ability, though less so for better readers. The contrast between the English and Spanish results is explained in terms of phonological considerations being more important for Spanish readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reported experiment examines the impact of stem frequency on lexical decision responses to prefixed words. Both when the nonword distractors had nonsense stems (e.g., recodge) and real-word stems (e.g., relaugh), words with high frequency stems (e.g., unreal) were recognized more quickly than words with low frequency stems (e.g., refuel) when matched on surface frequency. This was taken as evidence that a whole-word representation exists for prefixed words, but that activation of this representation is always mediated by a representation of the stem, unlike the claims of a Dual Pathways model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research presented here examines the proposal that orthographic processing in reading polysyllabic words takes place via an analysis of the word into an orthographic/morphological structure called the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure or BOSS. This structure includes the largest possible coda in the first component (e.g., the THUND of THUNDER) and, as such, it cuts across the phonological syllable boundary (e.g., THUN + DER). The existence of the BOSS has been previously supported by showing that words physically divided at their BOSS (e.g., THUNDER) are faster to recognize than those divided at their syllable (e.g., THUNDER). However, there has been little, if any, report of confirmatory evidence for this conclusion. Three experiments are reported here demonstrating that whether the BOSS division is faster than the syllable division depends crucially on the reading ability of the participants. Better adult reading, independently measured in terms of comprehension, is associated with a preference for the BOSS division while poorer adult reading is more associated with a syllable preference. Such a result potentially explains the conflicting findings that have been previously reported. A number of different explanations are offered for the pattern of results, with the suggestion that poorer adult reading is more oriented toward the pronunciation of the word than is better reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the processing units involved in the reading of French polysyllabic words. Comparison between units following maximal onset and coda principles; Irrelevance of the syllabic structure to visual word recognition; Correlation between stored lexical and incoming sensory representations.

Studies the influence of the phonological characteristics of the French language on the functional units of reading. Difficulty in positioning of the syllable boundary; Background on the concept of the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS); Recognition of polymorphemic words through sublexical units; Biasing of nonword pronunciations.