Masked transposition priming effects are observed in Korean in the same–different task

Abstract

Research suggests that readers of Korean Hangul demonstrate precise orthographic coding. In contrast to findings from many other languages, the identification of Hangul words is not speeded by prior masked presentation of transposition primes relative to substitution primes. The present studies asked whether evidence for precise orthographic coding is also observed in the same-different task – a task claimed to reflect pre-lexical orthographic representations. Experiments tested whether masked transposed-letter (Experiment 1) or transposed-syllable-block (Experiment 2) primes facilitate judgments about whether a target matches a reference stimulus. In contrast to previous results using lexical decision, significant transposition effects were observed in both cases. These findings add weight to the proposition that apparent differences across writing systems in the precision of orthographic coding may reflect demands of the word identification process rather than properties of orthographic representations themselves.

Mirror letter priming is rightward-biased but not inhibitory: Little evidence for a mirror suppression mechanism in the recognition of mirror letters.

“…The masked priming effects observed with lexical decision may be due to word-level mechanisms, in particular, processes related to lexical access rather than, or in addition to the letter identification process. (For examples of this distinction between lexical and orthographic locus of masked priming effects with Arabic words, see Boudelaa et al, 2019, and for Korean words, see Lee et al, 2021). The most straightforward remedy of this problem is to use single-letter stimuli and nonlexical letter strings in a task that does not require lexical access; accordingly, this is the approach we take in the present study.…”