Another look at the role of vowel letters in word reading in L2 English among native Korean readers

While evidence shows that consonants play a primary role over vowels in reading Roman script, it remains unclear whether this primacy extends to reading non-Roman script. This study investigated the role of vowels in L2 English word reading among native Korean readers. Seventy six Korean- and English-speaking adults read words in a naming test. Stimuli included four conditions: lowercase, uppercase, letter strings with no vowels (e.g., cmnin for common), and letter strings with randomly missing letters (e.g., corct for correct). Overall, the vowel deletion manipulation gave rise to higher accuracy and faster reading than the random omission condition for the two groups. When the baseline was controlled, the group and condition variables jointly affected accuracy, but the condition and L1 script are independent of each other for latency. Results suggest that the consonant letter primacy observed in Roman script may not fully extend to other alphabetic languages.