The inhibitory effect of phonological syllables, rather than orthographic syllables, as evidenced in Korean lexical decision tasks

Previous studies on shallow orthographies and clear syllable boundaries of languages-such as Spanish, German, and French-report an inhibitory effect in lexical decision tasks when targets have more densely frequent syllable neighborhoods (MFSNs). However, these results do not indicate whether the inhibitory effect derives from orthographic syllable representations or phonological syllable representations, because the target words in those studies were mixed in terms of orthographic and phonological representations. The present study investigated whether an inhibitory effect due to lexical competitors derives from phonological or orthographic syllables, using two lexical decision tasks with Korean bisyllable words. In Experiment 1, when a target had MFSNs that controlled for orthographically related sublexical variables (e.g., bigram frequency, the density of orthographic neighborhoods, and the density of more frequent orthographic syllable neighborhoods), the facilitative effect occurred. In Experiment 2, a typical inhibitory effect in a lexical decision task was elicited by a dense MFSN in a phonologically defined syllable, while a dense MFSN in an orthographically defined syllable did not create the inhibitory effect. The results suggest that an inhibitory effect due to lexical competition might not be derived from orthographic syllables, but from phonological syllables.