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Article published In:
Writing Systems: Past, present (… and future?)
Edited by Terry Joyce and Robert Crellin
[Written Language & Literacy 22:2] 2019
► pp. 223–246

More than an alphabet

Linguistic features of Korean and their influences on Hangul word recognition

| University of Cincinnati
| Yeungnam University
| Yeungnam University

The Korean Hangul writing system conforms to the alphabetic principle to the extent that its graphs (i.e., its minimal orthographic components) represent phonemes, but it differs from the standard convention of alphabetic orthography by configuring its syllables as blocks. This paper describes the orthographic, phonological, and morphological characteristics of the Korean language and Hangul and reviews a selection of psycholinguistic studies that have investigated Hangul word recognition. In contrast to the results of studies employing Roman alphabetic orthographies, the reviewed evidence highlights at sublexical levels both the dominance of syllable-based processing and a propensity to process CVC syllables as body (CV) plus coda (C) units rather than as onset (C) plus rime (VC) units, which together indicate a script-specific decoding of Hangul words. Although the morphological characteristics of Korean have yet to be fully investigated, consistent with the fact that approximately 70 percent of the Korean lexicon consists of Sino-Korean vocabulary, studies have also observed morphological effects on Hangul word recognition. Based on the psycholinguistic evidence reviewed, this paper concludes by proposing to refer to Hangul as a morphosyllabic alphabet writing system, to the extent that the term appears to adequately capture the orthographic, phonological, and morphological characteristics of the script.

Keywords: Korean Hangul, orthography, phonology, morphology, word recognition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The writing system, Hangul
    • 2.1Purposeful invention
    • 2.2Beyond the arbitrariness of written signs
  • 3.Linguistic features
    • 3.1Orthographic features
    • 3.2Phonological features
    • 3.3Morphological features
  • 4.Psycholinguistic evidence
    • 4.1Orthographic evidence
    • 4.2Phonological evidence
    • 4.3Morphological evidence
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00027.pae
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