Abstract

Korean words are classified into three types based on their origin: Sino-Korean words, native words, and loanwords. While most Sino-Korean words consist of multiple morphemes, native words can be further categorized into monomorphemic words and polymorphemic words, depending on their morphological structure. Previous research (Shin & Park, 2023) has shown that various letter characteristics (such as letter frequency, vowel direction, and the presence of final consonants) affect lexical decision times for two-syllable Hangul words. The present study aims to investigate whether the effects of letter variables differ according to word type. To explore this, lexical decision time data from KLP (Yi et al., 2017) were analyzed, by categorizing words based on word length (2, 3, and 4 syllables) and word type (three origins). Native words were further classified as either monomorphemic or polymorphemic, based on the number of morphemes. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that for two-syllable Sino-Korean words, lexical decision time tended to increase with the frequency of both the first and second letters, and it was longer when the first letter contained a final consonant. For two-syllable native words, lexical decision time only increased with the frequency of the first letter, but this effect was observed exclusively in polymorphemic words. In contrast, for two-syllable loanwords, lexical decision time increased with the frequency of the second letter. For three-syllable and four-syllable words, the effects of letter variables were less pronounced, and no significant difference was found between monomorphemic and polymorphemic native words. These findings suggest that word processing may vary depending on the word type, particularly indicating that the processing of two-syllable monomorphemic words and polymorphemic words may differ.