한국언어과학회

This study investigated the letter transposition effect across the syllables of a Korean word (e.g., 전상[prime] -> 선장[target]). The stimuli that are similar to those used by Lee and Taft (2009) were used in the masked priming task. Lee and Taft argued that if letters of a Korean word is position specific, there would be no confusion when letters are transposed within a word. In addition, it is expected no transposition effect would appear because the previous study did not show any effect for the transposition of letters within a syllable. The main experimental conditions were onset-onset, and coda-coda transposition to the target (e.g., 전상 -> 선장, 성잔 -> 선장). The results showed that the nonword prime transposition conditions of onset and onset, coda and coda condition elicited inhibitory priming, which is a different pattern as compared to the prediction of the existing letter transposition hypotheses. It is interpreted that the neighborhood words activated by the prime would inhibit the processing of the target word.