Orthographic and phonological links in Korean lexical processing

한국어 어휘 처리 과정에서 글짜 정보와 발음 정보의 연결성

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in thelexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic Hanmoon and alphabetic/syllabic Hangul, on a task where judgements must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Four experiments are reported using a "homophone decision task" and manipulating the sub-lexical relationship between orthography and phonology in Hanmoon and Hangul, and the lexical status of the stimuli. Hangul words showed a much higher error rate in judging whether there was another word identically pronounced than both Hangul nonwords and Hanmoon words. It is concluded that the relationship between orthography and phonology in the lexicon differs according tn the type of script owing to the availability of sub-lexical information: the process of making a homophone derision is based on a spread of activation exclusively among lexical entries, from orthography to phonology and vice versa (called "Orthography-Phonology-Orthography Rebound" or "OPO Rebound"). The results are explained within the mulitilevel interactive activation model with orthographic units linked to phonological units at each level.