Changhwan Lee

College Students With ADHD Traits and Their Language Styles

Objective: As an exploratory study, this article investigated the relationship between ADHD symptoms and the style of language use of undergraduate college students in Korea. Method: For this study, participants were asked to use stream-of-consciousness writing about any topic. Then, each participant’s piece of writing was analyzed by the Korean Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (KLIWC), a language analysis program. Results: The findings in this study demonstrated that college students with ADHD symptoms used significantly less “clauses per sentence,” “morphemes per sentence,” “numeral pronouns,” “English,” and “home,” whereas they used significantly more “sentences,” “adjectives,” and “TV and movie” in their consciousness writing. Conclusion: This study indicates that college students with ADHD traits have a different language style from their non-ADHD cohorts. Further research studies should be conducted to replicate our findings and develop specific interventions accordingly.

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.

Distinctive linguistic styles in children with ADHD.

To assess whether the writing styles of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) combined type differ significantly from those of children in a nonclinical control group, writing samples from 17 children with ADHD combined type and 18 children in a nonclinical control group were compared using the language analysis program Korean Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. These writing samples, produced in response to instructions, served as dependent variables. Analysis showed that children with ADHD used fewer linguistic variables (e.g., sentences, phrases, and morphemes) than the control group. In addition, the ADHD group used fewer words reflecting cognitive processes and fewer pronouns than members of the control group. Also, the ADHD group showed a different pattern in the use of words referring to friends. This study provides preliminary descriptive data on language use among children diagnosed with a main subtype of ADHD.

Writing Styles of a Korean Sample by Age: An Exploratory Study

This descriptive study concerned whether language use differs across age groups of Korean participants. Language use by Koreans in their 20s, 40s, and 60s were compared using the Korean Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Analysis showed that Koreans in their 60s used as many phrases and morphemes per sentence as younger people, which reflects similar complexity of language. In addition, those in their 40s showed the strongest use of words related to emotion, cognition, work, and leisure. These results show interesting differences from studies conducted with Western subjects.

Early Effect of Phonological Information in Korean Visual Word Recognition: An ERP Investigation with Transposed Letters

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological information on visual word recognition by using letter transposition effects. The Korean writing system gives a unique opportunity to investigate such phenomenon since the transposition of the beginning consonant (onset) and the end consonant (coda) of a certain syllable allows one to keep the coda phonology constant while changing the written alphabetic characters. In this study, 23 participants’ ERPs to such transposition cases were compared with the ERPs to cases that do not maintain coda phonology while the participants were performing a go/no-go lexical decision task for visually presented letter strings. The results of the current study showed that transposed materials with original phonological information produce less N250 than both the baseline condition and the transposed materials with different phonological information condition. The results suggest that phonological information is used early in the lexical process in Korean and early orthographic processing is influenced by the characteristics of the grapheme to phoneme conversion process.