Abstract

Several recent studies have argued that, as in face recognition, parts of an object, including words, force and automatically activate the entire representation, even for general object recognition. The main effect reported in support of this claim is the word composite effect. The word composite effect is an interaction effect in which the extent to which an unattended part of a word affects the activation of the whole word representation depends on the degree of word alignment. This effect was observed in both Portuguese and Chinese, which use different writing systems. The present study investigated whether the word-composite effect is also present in Korean, which has a different writing system, and proposed an alternative way to apply this effect to study the processing of the second syllable, which has not received much attention in the literature. The results of the experiment showed a significant word-composite effect in the same-different task (two word stimuli presented in succession, requiring a ‘same’ response if the first syllable is the same and a ‘different’ response if it is different), suggesting that the word-composite effect is present in Korean with different writing systems and that the same-different task is a suitable alternative method to study the processing of second syllables.