The two-dimensional orthography of phonology and morphology in differentiating Korean and Chinese

ABSTRACT The differences of writing systems are reflected in the processing of the languages in question. Word recognition constrained by writing systems has been attended by various theories. By analysing the recognition processes of Korean and Chinese words in this study, two of theories, the orthographic depth hypothesis (ODH) and the two-dimensional orthography of phonology and morphology (OPM) were compared. The ODH predicted that word recognition in the case of transparent orthography between sound and spelling is processed by grapheme-phoneme decoding to show the phonological effect in a lexical task. Since the OPM posits two independent dimensions of phonology and morphology, it can explain the morphological effect which is independent of the phonological effect and which is disregarded by the ODH. Testing morphological intrusion in a pronunciation-matching task, this study confirmed that the larger effect on Chinese in Experiment 2 compared with Korean in Experiment 1 supported the OPM. However, further discussion suggests that the ODH is not rejected, but regarded to be subordinate to the OPM. The former was posited only on one dimension of phonological orthography, and the latter both on phonology and on morphology.