Morphological representation and processing of Sino-Korean words

Kwangoh Yi

Department of Psychology, Yeungnam University

There are three types of words in the Korean language. The Sino-Korean type of words has been imported from China over a long period in the history. The Sino-Korean type of words occupy over 70% of the whole Korean vocabulary. Just like Sino-Japanese words of Japanese, the Sino-Korean words are morphological compounds. Each syllable of a Sino-Korean word corresponds to a Chinese character, and has its own meaning and pronunciation which can be traced back to the Chinese character. The Sino-Korean words are written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, whereas the Sino-Japanese words are usually written in Kanji. For it is common that each syllable of Sino-Korean words written in Hangul corresponds to more than two Chinese character, Korean readers have to deal with those ambiguities in mapping Hangul syllables to Sino-Korean morphemes in visual word recognition. Behavioral studies have shown that morphologically related Sino-Korean primes don't facilitate or inhibit the processing of the target Sino-Korean words whereas orhographically related Sino-Korean primes constantly inhibit the processing of the target words. Based on these findings and other related research, I argue that morphological representation intervenes between word-form and meaning representation, and that there are strong inhibitory connections between word-form representations which have the same syllable at the same position. Lastly, I will try to indicate what are common and different in recognizing words originated from the Chinese language between Korea, Japan, and China