Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Korean has a simple syllable structure like Mandarin Chinese, but it allows for resyllabification unlike Chinese. Its rhythmis often perceived as syllable-timed, although the frequent occurrence of taps and strong final lengthening also give it thestress-timed impression. It uses a script that consists of characters, but the characters are phonologically-based. Thesemixed characteristics make it difficult to predict whether the Korean word production system employs the phoneme or thesyllable or even the mora as the proximate unit for phonological encoding. The present study adopted the form preparationtask, in which the onset phoneme (n, g, ch, b) was the shared phonological content among the response words in thehomogeneous context. The participants were 23 college students conveniently recruited from university campuses inSeoul. The observed onset preparation effect was close to zero. The result rules out the phoneme as the proximate unit inKorean word production.