The Topology of Hangul: Learnability, Efficiency, and Utility

This chapter discusses the topology of Hangul to understand how the constituents of syllables and words are arranged and interrelated to promote emergent readers’ learnability, expert readers’ efficiency, and the pragmatic utility of the writing system for all readers. To understand how Hangul is visually processed based on the surface forms of words and intrasyllabic units, the chapter first reviews linguistic units, including segments (consonants and vowels), body-coda units, and syllables, and then moves on to the effects of syllabic formats on visual word processing. Syllables are underscored as a processing unit. Hangul is defined as a script that is “more than an alphabet” to capture the multifaceted characteristics of the alphabet, including phonemic, syllabic, and morphological features. It finally discusses Hangul’s learnability, efficiency, and utility as a writing system.