Parafoveal processing of underlying phonological information during Korean sentence reading

The question of whether phonological information is integrated through the parafovea has remained unanswered particularly in Korean sentence reading. The current study used homophones with identical underlying phonological forms but with different orthography to examine phonological preview benefit effects in Korean. In an eye-tracking experiment using the boundary paradigm, target fixations were shorter (a) when the preview-target pairs were identical than when they were unrelated, (b) when the pairs were orthographically similar than when they were unrelated, and most importantly, (c) when the pairs were phonologically identical than when they were phonologically similar but different. These results indicate that underlying phonological information of a word, aside from orthographic information, is integrated through parafoveal preview during Korean sentence reading.