The role of antibody in Korean word recognition.

A subsyllabic phonological unit, the antibody, has received little attention as a potential fundamental processing unit in word recognition. The psychological reality of the antibody in Korean recognition was investigated by looking at the performance of subjects presented with nonwords and words in the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the nonwords with a high-frequency antibody were processed more slowly than those with a low-frequency antibody. Experiment 2 showed that separating the antibody unit is advantageous in processing certain types of Korean words. These results indicate that the antibody is a part of the lexical representation system and is a fundamental unit of lexical processing.