Orthographic and phonological activation in the semantic processing of Korean Hanja and Hangul

The Korean orthography includes alphabetic Hangul and logographic Hanja scr ipts. Two experiments investigated whether (a) the role of phonological and orthographic activation differs during semantic processing of Hangul and H anja and (b) proficiency in Hanja would affect the way that phonology is us ed in the comprehension of Hanja characters. In Experiment 1, in which Hanj a was tested, less-skilled Hanja readers produced more false positive categ orisation errors on homophone foils, as well as on visually similar foils, than on their corresponding controls. Skilled Hanja readers however, produc ed reliable visual similarity effects, but not homophonic effects. These re sults indicate that phonology plays a prominent role in the semantic proces sing of logographic Hanja for the less-skilled readers, but not for the ski lled readers, In Experiment 2, in which Hangul was tested, both skilled and less-skilled Hanja readers displayed strong homophonic effects for pseudoh omophones, suggesting that phonology plays a crucial role in the semantic p rocessing of Hangul, Overall, the results indicate that both language profi ciency and script difference can affect the pattern of semantic processing of written language.