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KMID : 0917520070140010007
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Journal of Speech Sciences
2007 Volume.14 No. 1 p.7 ~ p.19
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Frequency Inheritance in the Production of Korean Homophones
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Han Jeong-Im
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Abstract
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The present study investigates the so-called frequency inheritance effect in word production. According to some earlier studies (e.g. Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), retrieval of a low-frequency homophone benefits from its high-frequency homophone twin, and more specifically word-retrieval RT is determined by the frequency of the phonological form of the word (sum of homophone frequencies) rather than the frequency of the specific word. This result, however, has been challenged by later studies (e.g. Caramazza et al., 2001) and one possible resolution is that languages differ in the extent to which the inheritance effect occurs. Two experiments are reported to test whether the frequency inheritance effect depends on the target language, namely, if a language such as Korean with relatively many homophones tend not to show frequency inheritance, which is compared with the language with fewer homophones such as Dutch and German (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Jescheniak et al., 2003). Experiment 1 was picture naming, and Experiment 2 used an English-to-Korean translation task. In both experiments, the homophones were actually slower than the low-frequency controls, suggesting that there was no evidence for the inheritance effect. These results imply that the issue of whether specific word or homophone frequency determines production can be properly assessed by taking into account the language-specific nature of the lexicon such as the percentage of the homophone words in that language.
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KEYWORD
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frequency inheritance effect, Korean, homophones
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