While the impact of visual letter similarity on word recognition in the Latin script has been extensively documented using masked priming techniques, research into non-Latin scripts such as Hangul remains limited. Hangul letters are systematically formed by adding one or two strokes to the base form, creating a pool of visually similar letters in the inventory. This study investigated the role of added distinctive strokes in word recognition by employing two experimental tasks: a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a same-different word matching task (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 1 revealed a visual similarity effect only for primes without distinctive strokes, indicating an asymmetry in the priming effects. Conversely, Experiment 2 showed that visually similar primes facilitated target word processing regardless of the presence of the distinctive stroke, indicating no asymmetric priming effect. These findings suggest initial uncertainty of letter identity during Korean word processing and the processing of distinctive strokes in differentiating visually similar words.
AlJassmiM. A.PereaM. (2024). Visual similarity effects in the identification of Arabic letters: Evidence with masked priming. Language and Cognition, 2024: 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2024.20
2.
BenyheA.LabuschM.PereaM. (2023). Just a mark: Diacritic function does not play a role in the early stages of visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30(4), 1530–1538. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02244-4
3.
BoudelaaS.PereaM.CarreirasM. (2020). Matrices of the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and allographs. Behavior Research Methods, 52, 1893–1905. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01353-z
4.
BrysbaertM.StevensM. (2018). Power analysis and effect size in mixed effects models: A tutorial. Journal of Cognition, 1(1), 9. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.10
5.
BürknerP. C. (2017). Brms: An R package for Bayesian multilevel models using Stan. Journal of Statistical Software, 80, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v080.i01
6.
ChetailF.BoursainE. (2019). Shared or separated representations for letters with diacritics?Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(1), 347–352. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1503-0
7.
DehaeneS.CohenL. (2007). The role of visual similarity, feedforward, feedback and lateral pathways in reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(11), 456–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.009
8.
DehaeneS.CohenL.SigmanM.VinckierF. (2005). The neural code for written words: A proposal. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(7), 335–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.004
9.
ForsterK. I. (1998). The pros and cons of masked priming. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27, 203–233. http://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023202116609
10.
ForsterK. I.ForsterJ. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35(1), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195503
GraingerJ. (2018). Orthographic processing: A “mid-level” vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett lecture. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(2), 335–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1314515
13.
Gutiérrez-SigutE.MarcetA.PereaM. (2019). Tracking the time course of letter visual-similarity effects during word recognition: A masked priming ERP investigation. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 19, 966–984. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-019-00696-1
14.
KinoshitaS.NorrisD. (2009). Transposed-letter priming of prelexical orthographic representations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014277
KinoshitaS.YuL.VerdonschotR. G.NorrisD. (2021). Letter identity and visual similarity in the processing of diacritic letters. Memory & Cognition, 49(4), 815–825. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01125-2
17.
LallyC.RastleK. (2023). Orthographic and feature-level contributions to letter identification. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(5), 1111–1119. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221106155
18.
LeeC. H.LallyC.RastleK. (2021). Masked transposition priming effects are observed in Korean in the same–different task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(8), 1439–1450. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021821997336
19.
LeeC. H.TaftM. (2009). Are onsets and codas important in processing letter position? A comparison of TL effects in English and Korean. Journal of Memory and Language, 60(4), 530–542. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.01.002
20.
LeeC. H.TaftM. (2011). Subsyllabic structure reflected in letter confusability effects in Korean word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 129–134. http://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-010-0028-y
21.
MarcetA.GhukasyanH.Fernández-LópezM.PereaM. (2020). Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?Applied Psycholinguistics, 41(3), 579–593. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716420000090
22.
MarcetA.PereaM. (2017). Is nevtral NEUTRAL? Visual similarity effects in the early phases of written-word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(4), 1180–1185. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1180-9
23.
MarcetA.PereaM. (2018a). Can I order a burger at rnacdonalds.com? Visual similarity effects of multi-letter combinations at the early stages of word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(5), 699–706. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000477
24.
MarcetA.PereaM. (2018b). Visual letter similarity effects during sentence reading: Evidence from the boundary technique. Acta Psychologica, 190, 142–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.08.007
25.
MolinaroN.DuñabeitiaJ. A.Marìn-GutièrrezA.CarreirasM. (2010). From numbers to letters: Feedback regularization in visual word recognition. Neuropsychologia, 48(5), 1343–1355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.12.037
26.
NorrisD.KinoshitaS. (2008). Perception as evidence accumulation and Bayesian inference: insights from masked priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(3), 434. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012799
27.
NorrisD.KinoshitaS. (2012). Reading through a noisy channel: Why there’s nothing special about the perception of orthography. Psychological Review, 119(3), 517–545. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028450
PereaM.Abu MallouhR.MohammedA.KhalifaB.CarreirasM. (2016). Do diacritical marks play a role at the early stages of word recognition in Arabic?Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 1255. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01255
30.
PereaM.BacieroA.MarcetA. (2021). Does a mark make a difference? Visual similarity effects with accented vowels. Psychological Research, 85(6), 2279–2290. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01405-1
31.
PereaM.DuñabeitiaJ. A.CarreirasM. (2008). R34d1ng w0rd5 w1th numb3r5. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34(1), 237–241. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.34.1.237
PereaM.HyönäJ.MarcetA. (2022). Does vowel harmony affect visual word recognition? Evidence from Finnish. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(12), 2004–2014. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000907
34.
PereaM.JiménezM.GomezP. (2014). A challenging dissociation in masked identity priming with the lexical decision task. Acta Psychologica, 148, 130–135. https://doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.01.014
35.
PereaM.MarcetA.Vergara-MartínezM. (2016). Does top-down feedback modulate the encoding of orthographic representations during visual-word recognition?Experimental Psychology, 63(5), 278–286. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000327
36.
PittrichK.SchroederS. (2023). Priming effects in reading words with vertically and horizontally mirrored letters. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(9), 2183–2196. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221141076
37.
R Core Team. (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
38.
RastleK.LallyC.LeeC. H. (2019). No flexibility in letter position coding in Korean. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45(4), 458–473. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000617
SimpsonI. C.MousikouP.MontoyaJ. M.DefiorS. (2013). A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 431–439. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0271-4
41.
YuL.ZhangQ.KeM.HanY.KinoshitaS. (2023). Some neighbors are more interfering: Asymmetric priming by stroke neighbors in Chinese character recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30, 1065–1073. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02207-9
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
