Abstract
The word length effect refers to the phenomenon of increasing reaction times as word length increases. However, some studies of Korean word recognition employing the lexical decision task have reported an opposite effect of mono-syllabic words being slower to recognize than bi-syllabic words. To further investigate the so-called mono-syllabic word inferiority effect, the present study conducted an experiment that provides additional evidence that mono-syllabic words are responded to more slowly than bi-syllabic words with the effect being stronger for high-frequency words. In contrast to the ideal length hypothesis advanced by New, Ferrand, Pallier, and Brysbaert (2006), this study proposes an alternative hypothesis involving morphological activation and competition processes.
