Say Young Kim

Korean has visually salient syllable units that are often mapped onto either prefixes or suffixes in derived words. In addition, prefixed and suffixed words may be processed differently given a left-to-right parsing procedure and the need to resolve morphemic ambiguity in prefixes in Korean. To test this hypothesis, four experiments using the masked priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted. Results showed that suffixed primes facilitated responses to their stem targets regardless of the

Three experiments using a priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted to examine whether cross-language activation occurs via decomposition during the processing of derived words in Korean–English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, when participants were given a real derived word and an interpretable derived pseudoword (i.e., illegal combination of a stem and a suffix) in Korean as a prime, response times for the corresponding English-translated stem were significantly faster than when the

Despite substantial research on the brain mechanisms of L1 and L2 processing in bilinguals, it is still unknown whether language modality (i.e., visual vs. auditory) plays a role in determining whether L1 and L2 are processed similarly. Therefore, we examined the neural representational similarity in neural networks between L1 and L2 in spoken and written word processing in Korean-English-Chinese trilinguals. Participants performed both visual and auditory rhyming judgments in the three language

A masked priming experiment with three prime durations (36, 48, and 72 ms) was conducted to examine the time course of cross-language activation of constituent morphemes in Korean-English bilingual readers. Results showed that real suffixed words in Korean L1 as the primes significantly facilitated responses for the corresponding English L2 translated stems at all prime durations. In contrast, suffixed pseudoword primes (i.e., an illegal combination of a stem and a suffix) in Korean elicited a s

Native speakers of Korean have been shown to prefer a left-branching body-coda subsyllabic structure over a right branching onset-rime structure when processing monosyllabic words in written language. However, counter-arguments have been made that the highly transparent nature of Korean hangul provides no preference for larger subsyllabic units beyond the phoneme. A masked priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to determine whether this subsyllabic preference occurs for orthographic p

Abstract Korean has a unique status compared to other alphabetic orthographies in terms of its phonology-orthography mapping and visual-orthographic configuration. In this chapter we reviewed recent literature on the neural bases of reading in Korean L1 to understand whether and how the characteristics of Korean orthography are reflected in the brain network. We then reviewed recent neuroimaging literature concerning the L1 effect on L2 reading with Korean L1. Evidence suggests that when reading