Effects of Visual, Lexical, and Contextual Factors on Word Recognition in Reading Korean Sentences

In order to assess the role of visual, lexical, and contextual information on word identification during Korean sentence reading, a self-paced reading experiment was conducted. It was found, with regard to word length variables, that the number of syllables and the number of visual features affected reading times significantly, but the other sub-lexical units (i.e., phonemes and letters) did not. The findings suggest that when taking internal structure variations into account, the relevant processing unit in Korean in the context of sentence is the syllable. In addition, the main effects of both word frequency and predictability on reading time were significant, respectively; however, the interaction between these two variables was not. The results imply that Korean word recognition during sentence reading is affected by word frequency and word predictability, additively.