The flexible encoding of syllable positions in Korean Hangul

It has been suggested that readers encode letter positions flexibly during word recognition, as evidenced by studies showing that misspelled words can still be read naturally (e.g., transposed letter effects). On the other hand, in some non-Roman alphabetic writing systems, such as Korean Hangul, syllables rather than individual letters within a word might be the main source of confusability, called the transposed syllable (TS) effect. Despite evidence supporting the existence of the TS effect, its specific characteristics remain largely unexplored. Here, we studied variables that may mediate the TS effect in Korean Hangul. In the first two experiments, we used the masked priming lexical decision task and observed that the TS effect (i.e., faster lexical decision when the prime was the internal TS version of the target than when it was the replaced-syllable version) was apparent only for high-frequency Korean Hangul stimuli. We also found that the priming effect on lexical decisions depends on the distance between the transposed syllables. Lastly, in Experiment 3, we demonstrated that the TS effect might also emerge at the pre-lexical perceptual level using the perceptual matching task. Our findings indicate that multiple stages of information processing support the TS effect in Korean Hangul.