Earticle

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of syllable and morpheme on Korean visual word recognition. Previous studies proposed that the frequency of the first syllable of a word is negatively related with word recognition while the size of the morpheme family is positively related. In this study, we examined this idea by comparing Korean compound words containing a separate morpheme in the first syllable with simple words, the first syllable of which does not correspond to a single morpheme. The participants were asked to perform lexical decision tasks for two syllable stimuli or two sequentially presented syllables. As a result, the syllable frequency effect was significant for simple words. However, the effect was absent for compound words when they were presented as two syllables while the effect was significant when they were presented sequentially one syllable by one syllable. The results suggested that the characteristics of the morpheme and syllable have strong influence on visual word recognition.