Content area

Full text

Kang, Jinwon, Seong-Hak Jo, Joo-Hee Ahn, Jung-Hye Choi, and Sun-Young Lee. 2025. Individual differences in morphological processing: The role of morphemic knowledge in Sino-Korean suffixed word recognition. Linguistic Research 42(2): 337-363. This study examined how morphemic knowledge influences visual recognition of Sino-Korean suffixed words. Sixty-three Korean young adults completed a masked priming lexical decision task including morphological, semantic, and orthographic priming conditions. Overall results revealed significant priming effects across all conditions, with the morphological priming effect much larger than semantic and orthographic effects. More importantly, semantic and orthographic priming effects diminished or disappeared as morphemic knowledge increased, while morphological priming remained larger and stable. A further group comparison revealed a significant difference in semantic priming only; a significantly larger effect in low-knowledge group. These findings suggest that lexical processing mainly depends on morphological decomposition focusing on the morphological cues, shifting away from semantic or orthographic cues with an increase in morphemic knowledge in individuals. (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology · Korea University - Cyber University of Korea - Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Keywords Korean lexical processing, visual word recognition, individual differences, morphological priming effect, morphemic knowledge

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)

1. Introduction

One of the key issues in psycholinguistics concerns understanding the process of morphologically complex words in visual word recognition. A great number of studies have found supporting evidence for the morphological decomposition hypothesis, which suggests that morphologically complex words are decomposed into separate morphemic units during early stages of processing (e.g., processing -> process + -ing). According to this view, morphemes are basic units of representation in the mental lexicon, so that morphological decomposition of a word into morphemes such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes is a default mechanism in lexical processing. It also suggests that the morphological analysis of the word occurs pre-lexically before whole-word recognition is complete (e.g., Taft and Forster 1975; Rastle, Davis, and New 2004; Gwilliams and Marantz 2015). As strong evidence for the morphological decomposition hypothesis, morphological priming effects have been used: words are typically recognized more quickly when preceded by morphologically related words (e.g., teacher - teach) than by unrelated or merely orthographically similar ones. However, previous findings on the morphological decomposition hypothesis have varied across languages and morpheme types. For example,...

Show less