No flexibility in letter position coding in Korean.

Abstract

Substantial research across Indo-European languages suggests that readers display a degree of uncertainty in letter position coding. For example, readers perceive transposedletter stimuli such as jugde as similar to their base words (e.g. judge). However, tolerance to disruptions of letter order is not apparent in all languages, suggesting that critical aspects of the writing system may shape the nature of position coding. We investigated readers' tolerance to these disruptions in Korean, a writing system characterized by a high degree of orthographic confusability. Results of three Korean masked priming experiments revealed robust identity priming effects, but no indication of priming due to shared letters or syllables in different positions. Two further masked priming experiments revealed where the Korean findings deviate from English. These results support the claim that the nature of the writing system influences the precision of orthographic representations used in reading. Public Significance StatementIt is widely reported that adults are tolerant to disruptions of letter order in reading. This research demonstrates that this tolerance does not extend to Korean reading. These data suggest that the reading system is shaped by fundamental characteristics of writing systems.

Shaping the precision of letter position coding by varying properties of a writing system

“…These results are consistent with previous cross-linguistic studies demonstrating reductions in transposed-letter effects in orthographically-dense scripts such as Hebrew (Velan & Frost, 2007 and Korean (Lee & Taft, 2011;Rastle et al, 2019). However, our findings are particularly powerful because the impact of orthographic density on letter position coding cannot be attributed to other confounding language characteristics or to variations in participant groups across languages.…”

“…However, recent research in Hebrew (Frost, 2012;Velan & Frost, 2011) and Korean (Rastle et al, 2019) suggests that this may not be a universal property of reading, but rather may depend on the orthographic density of a writing system. We sought to investigate the impact of orthographic density on the emergence of letter position coding using an artificial language learning paradigm.…”

“…Hebrew readers must therefore develop precise orthographic position coding, as tolerance to disruptions of letter order would often result in accessing the meaning of the wrong word. Evidence for precise orthographic representations has also been provided in Korean (Lee & Taft, 2011;Rastle, Lally & Lee, 2019) another language with a dense orthography, but which otherwise shares little similarity with Hebrew. Frost (2012) emphasized that reading is a learned skill, and that while this process will necessarily be constrained by low-level visual and neurobiological processes, flexibility will emerge only where it maximises the efficiency of word recognition.…”

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

“…They therefore favoured an explanation in terms of the orthographic density of the Hangul writing system. Overall, the data of Rastle et al (2019) appear consistent with the arguments of Frost (2012;also Lerner et al, 2014): position flexibility or rigidity in orthographic representations is not "universal" across writing systems but is a learned consequence of the extent to which position information is required in word identification.…”

“…In fact, this study also failed to find priming for a single syllable shared in the same position (−1 ms priming). This combination of results led Rastle et al (2019) to suggest that the precision of Hangul orthographic codes may be a phenomenon that extends beyond position information (see also Kim & Davis, 2002).…”