Lexical Factors that Influence the Korean Eojeol Recognition

抄録

The current study was designed to see what the representation unit of Korean Eojeols is, and to see whether the syntactic-categorically and semantically ambiguous Eojeol, which is the between-unit of words and phrases in Korean sentences, activates multiple meanings, even though the multi-meanings are associated with the different syntactic-category. Two primed-lexical decision experiments and two lexical decision experiments were performed. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the prime Eojeol and the target word was manipulated in two SOA conditions (150ms and 1000ms). The prime Eojeol was syntactic-categorically (e.g. noun or verb Eojeol) and semantically ambiguous. The results showed that all the noun and verb related meanings were activated by the syntactic-categorically and semantically ambiguous prime Eojeols at the short 150ms SOA condition, but only the noun-related meaning was activated at the long 1000ms SOA condition. In Experiment 2, the prime Eojeol, in which the fully conjugated Eojeol was not ambiguous but the embedded word or word stem in the Eojeol has many meanings, was presented as a related or unrelated with the target words. As in Experiment 1, two SOA conditions, 150ms and 1000ms, were used for the primed-lexical decision task. Differently from Experiment 1 results, only the verb-related meaning, consistent with the fully conjugated Eojeol, was activated but not in the noun-related meaning. Experiment 3 and 4 were designed to see whether the frequency of the Eojeol is the main factor to determine the lexical decision time presented in the isolated and sentence embedded form. In two experiments, the results showed the strongest effect of the Eojeol frequency among other variables to support the possibility of the Eojeol as the mental representation unit. The results of four experiments indicate that the fully conjugated form of Eojeols  is the possibility of Eojeol as a lexical entry unit especially when used in the verb Eojeol.