The Word Frequency Effects Modulated by Age in Korean Sentence Reading : Evidence from an Eye Tracking Study

Effects of age and word frequency on Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from a web-based large-scale lexical-decision task.

“…The lack of an interaction between age and frequency contrasts with previous Korean word recognition studies (E. H. Seong et al, 2019). E. H. found a larger word-frequency effect in lexical decisions by older adults in their This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…In contrast, even a comparable mixed-effects regression analysis on the current data comparing participants in their 20s versus those in their 60s still did not show a significant interaction between frequency and age group on RT (β = 0.002, SE = 0.002, t = 1.102, p = .270). One crucial difference between E. H. and Seong et al (2019), on one hand, and the present study on the other, is that unlike This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.…”

“…One crucial difference between E. H. Lee and Lee (2019) and Seong et al (2019), on one hand, and the present study on the other, is that unlike the two preceding studies, we measured participants’ reading skill and included this measure as a control factor in the analyses. The fact that controlling for individual reading skill yielded no interaction between frequency and age suggests that the increased word-frequency effect for older adults found in the previous studies may have been driven by differences in the participants’ reading skill rather than their age differences.…”

“…One of the most studied and robust psycholinguistic phenomena in word recognition is a frequency effect, which refers to the tendency for more frequent words (e.g., life in English) to be recognized and produced more efficiently than less frequent words (e.g., dove; Brysbaert et al, 2011Brysbaert et al, , 2018Monsell et al, 1989). Word frequency effects are found not only in Roman-script languages such as English and German but also in languages using different writing systems including Arabic, Japanese, and Korean (Bentin & Ibrahim, 1996;Brysbaert et al, 2011;Hino et al, 2003;Seong et al, 2019), suggesting that the role of word frequency in lexical access appears universal across languages irrespective of writing systems. Although there is little controversy over the existence of the frequency effect itself, the question of how it changes across the adult age spectrum has yielded mixed results, with the previous studies having reported three different patterns of results: (a) the frequency effect growing stronger with age, (b) its strength declining with age, or (c) its strength being unaffected by age.…”

“…One of many underrepresented languages in the literature of cognitive aging is Korean, whose writing system Hangul is similar to Roman-script languages in the sense that it has an inventory of alphabetic letters but is also unique in that these letters are combined into character blocks that represent syllables. Although a few studies have examined how aging affects word recognition in Korean (e.g., E. H. Seong et al, 2019), they were rather small-scale research with the number of participants limited to less than a hundred, divided into two groups of extreme age spans (20s and 6-70s). Therefore, in order to add to the literature on cognitive aging and visual word recognition in Korean, the present study implemented a large-scale Korean lexical-decision task, in which a heterogeneous group of approximately 500 adult readers in their 20s through 60s responded to 120 Korean words.…”