Abstract

Sino-Korean words are Chinese words that have been borrowed into the Korean language over a long period of history. Currently representing over 70 percent of the entire Korean vocabulary, Sino-Korean words are typically two syllables in length and morphologically compound in structure. Behavioral studies have shown that although morphologically related Sino-Korean primes neither facilitate nor inhibit the processing of a target Sino-Korean word, orthographically related Sino-Korean primes tend to inhibit the recognition of a target word. Such findings are inconsistent with existing models for English and Chinese. Based on these Korean research findings, it is proposed that a level of morphological representations exists between word-form and semantic representation, and that there are strong inhibitory connections between word-form representations that share a given syllable in a particular word position. A number of related issues are also discussed, such as the representation of morphology within the mental lexicon, individual differences in terms of reading proficiency, semantic versus morphological relatedness, and the position of critical constituents.

Introduction

The Korean alphabet, or Hangul, consists of fourteen consonant and ten vowel letters. While each letter of Hangul represents a phoneme, it is more accurate to characterize the present Korean writing system as being morphophonemic in nature, rather than purely phonemic. In order to correctly spell a Korean word, it is necessary to consider both its phonological and morphological characteristics.