The three languages, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, have long been interrelated with each other. Even though both Korean and Japanese developed their own writing systems, Hangul and Kana, respectively different from Chinese - Hangul and Kana represent ...
The three languages, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, have long been interrelated with each other. Even though both Korean and Japanese developed their own writing systems, Hangul and Kana, respectively different from Chinese - Hangul and Kana represent speech sounds rather than word meanings, the vocabulary of Korean and Japanese have greatly expanded through the influx of Chinese words into the two languages. Those words derived from Chinese consist of over 60% of Korean and Japanese vocabulary, respectively.
The present study examined how Chinese words were processed in the three languages. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese students participated in the experiments and performed three tasks, naming, lexical decision, morphemic priming tasks. The same Chinese words were used as stimuli for each task. But the stimuli were printed in Hangul for Korean, in Kanji for Japanese, and in Chinese for Chinese participants.
Since Hangul represents speech sounds and both Chinese and Kanji represent word meanings, the stimuli printed in Hangul were expected to be processed more quickly than those printed in Kanji and Chinese for naming task. However, the stimuli printed in Kanji and Chinese were expected to be processed more quickly than those printed in Hangul for lexical decision task. While a Hangul character representing a syllable of a word is usually mapped to many morphemes, each character in both Kanji and Chinese is mostly mapped to a single morpheme. Therefore, with respect to the morpheme priming task, large priming effects were expected from Chinese and Japanese. In contrast, a small or null effect was expected from Korean.
The results of the experiments turned out to be consistent with all these predictions.