The development of sentence interpretation in Korean children

Sue Young Kim, Purdue University

Abstract

Two fundamental aspects of grammar in Korean are word order and noun suffixes. This study examined the development of children's interpretation of these two aspects. Four groups of 15 monolingual Korean-speaking children (age 3, 4, 5, and 6 years) and 15 monolingual Korean-speaking adults served as subjects. The subjects were asked to determine which of two nouns in a sentence served as the agent. Seven different sentence types were employed. All were of the form Noun + Noun + Verb, but differed in how many of the nouns contained suffixes (two, one, or none), and the order of the suffixed nouns in the sentence (subject marker attached to the first, or second noun; object marker attached to the first, or second noun). The results showed increasing accuracy of performance with age. The youngest children performed above chance levels only if both word order and noun marker cues were present. Evidence for a separate word order response strategy was apparent by age 4 years, and was stronger at each successive age. At age 4, the appearance of subject markers served to augment children's performance on sentences that were already consistent with their word order strategy. However, older children used the subject marker as a possible cue that a different word order was involved. Sensitivity to object markers was apparent only in the adults. The findings were only partially consistent with expectations based on languages bearing typological similarities to Korean. In particular, word order cues and subject marker cues appear to have greater strength in Korean than in these other languages. It was suggested that the optional nature of noun suffixes in Korean is largely responsible for this fact. Finally, these data have implications for current theoretical models. The older Korean children and adults appeared to use word order and noun markers as complementary strategies: If the sentence contained no noun markers, word order was employed; if noun markers were present, these were used as the cue to interpretation. Current models of sentence interpretation use as their metric the relative strength of cues in competition, and are unable to accommodate strategies employed in the "either-or" manner observed in the present study.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Leonard, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Speech therapy

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