• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.99-115
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• 2021

Unlike most other alphabetic languages, letter transposition effect was not found in Korean except in the syllable level and in the morpheme level. This study was conducted in order to investigate the possible reason of the absence of letter transposition effect in Korean. Based on previous letter transposition studies, this study was to investigate on whether syllable frequency is a moderating variable and is responsible for the absence of the letter transposition effect. The results showed that significant letter transposition effect was found when a transposed non-word has high frequency syllable(e.g., 민주화 → 진무화), while such effect was not seen in a transposed non-word with low frequency syllable. The results showed that the letter transposition effect can found in Korean as well. The results also implicate the possibility that syllable frequency is the main moderating variable regarding the Korean letter transposition effect.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.161-185
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• 2024

The letter transposition effect is crucial for understanding whether letter position coding within words is fixed. Despite the recognized importance of syllables in Korean word recognition, studies on syllable transposition effects have been inconsistent, indicating a lack of clarity on its mechanisms. Our study aims to address this by analyzing the syllable transposition effect, with a particular focus on distinguishing the influences of orthographic from morphological processing. This focus is due to Korean syllables serving simultaneously as units of orthography and elements of morphology. Through a masked priming lexical decision task with bisyllabic words, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 examined the effect across various word types to assess the impact of word origin, while Experiment 2 directly compared the influences of morphological and semantic processing. Results from both experiments showed a significant syllable transposition effect across all word types, pointing to orthographic processing as the key factor in the effect, rather than morphological or semantic factors. This underscores the flexibility of syllable position coding in the early stages of word processing and emphasizes orthographic processing as the primary influence on the syllable transposition effect.