고려대학교

초록/요약

This study investigates whether three syllabic features, which are the classes of words, the types of words, and the positions in words from which orthographic syllables are drawn, have an effect on the probability for a pair of the sublexical items to be a legitimate Korean word when they are combined at random. As a result of three computational experiments, three main findings were obtained as follows: (1) the combination of a pair of syllables generated more real words when their positions in words were preserved than not; (2) the combination of a pair of syllables from a homogeneous word type produced more real words than from heterogeneous word types and the combination of a pair of sino-Korean syllables showed the higher productivity than of native Korean ones as well; and (3) the combination of a pair of syllables from a homogeneous word class created more real words than from heterogeneous word classes and the combination of a pair of noun syllables was more productive than of verb ones as well. These findings suggest that the word classes, the word types, and the positions in words have a significant impact on the probability of inter-syllabic combinations in Korean word formation, and that the syllables as sublexical units play an important role in organization of lexical representations in the mental lexicon of native speakers of Korean.