The relationship between the literacy and the efficiency of lexical access

Although the literacy has been recently emphasized in many areas, it is known rarely that the relationship between the literacy and the word recognition process. To find the relationship, the present study conducted an exploratory study to investigate whether a correlation between the literacy and the lexical access in a process of word recognition existed, and an experiment to specify the relation among two variables. This study found that a relevance between the literacy and lexical decision latencies and accuracy rates reflecting the effectiveness of lexical access through the exploratory study. The experimental study used the lexical decision task that ask participants to press “word” or “nonword” button when they showed strings on the monitor as correctly and rapidly as they can. Four hundred words were selected from Korean newspapers DB and dialog DB randomly and used stimuli in the lexical decision task. The current study used verified questionary for the literacy. The results show that upper score group in the literacy score elicit faster lexical decision latency and higher accuracy than lower score group. Based on the result, the present study explained which processes of the lexical access were more efficient in the upper group as compared to the lower group.