Asymmetric Effects of Pronouns on L2 Acquisition of Raising

( Choe¸ Jinsun ) 한국현대언어학회 2021 언어연구 Vol.37 No.2

The Journal of Studies in Language 37.2, 213-225. This study investigates Korean-speaking learners’ comprehension of raising constructions containing an experiencer phrase. Specifically, it examines whether the type of the intervening experiencer (pronoun, lexical NP) produces a similar asymmetric effect on L2 learners’ comprehension as it does on children’s. A picture-based truth-value judgment task was conducted with one hundred Korean-speaking adults to test the comprehension of different patterns of raising constructions. The results found that the learners’ comprehension was better when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g., John seems to her to be happy), compared to a pronoun raised across a lexical NP (e.g., He seems to Mary to be happy). These findings parallel the pattern of raising in child English and are consistent with a processing-based approach to intervention effects observed in both L1 and L2 acquisition across different constructions. (Korea University of Technology and Education)

L2 Acquisition of English Copy-Raising Constructions by Korean Learners

Jinsun Choe 담화·인지언어학회 2019 담화와 인지 Vol.26 No.2

This study investigates L2 learners’ comprehension of English copy-raising constructions containing an experiencer (e.g., Susan seems to Mary like she is a nice person), in which the subject of the matrix clause is coreferential with the embedded pronominal subject, and there lies an intervening experiencer between the matrix verb and the embedded clause. Previous research has shown that L2 learners, like L1 children, have difficulty comprehending the canonical raising construction (e.g., John seems to Mary to be happy), and that the copy-raising construction also poses a challenge for L1 children. The present study gathers and analyzes data from twenty-eight native Koreanspeaking learners of English who participated in a Truth-value judgment task. The results showed the learners’ poor performance on the copy-raising construction. In particular, the learners were consistently making incorrect choices by interpreting the referent of the embedded pronoun to be the referent of the experiencer. This finding suggests that the copy-raising construction presents a similar challenge to L2 learners, as does the canonical raising construction. These results are discussed in terms of intervention effects which may not be limited to the canonical raising pattern but may be generalized to include various types of constructions, including the copy-raising pattern.

Acquisition of the Mapping between the Causation Type and the Causative Form in Korean

Jinsun Choe 한국언어학회 2014 언어 Vol.39 No.3

This paper investigates whether the two kinds of causatives in Korean (morphological and syntactic) encode causation to different degrees of directness, and at what age children acquire these properties. A Truth-Value Judgment Task was used to test twenty Korean-speaking adults and thirty-seven Korean-speaking children. The results showed that both adults and children usually accepted the syntactic causative with both direct and indirect causation. As for the morphological causative, however, both adults and children accepted it most of the time with direct causation. Further analysis by verb type showed that children"s adult-like behavior was limited to only occur with certain high frequency verbs like mek-ta "eat" and ip-ta "wear", suggesting that there are developmental stages children go through in acquiring the adult-like mapping between the causative form and the causative type.

The Roles of L1 Knowledge and Intervention Effects in the L2 Acquisition of English Control and Raising Constructions

Jinsun Choe(최진선) 한국언어학회 2017 언어 Vol.42 No.3

This paper investigates whether Korean learners of English can comprehend (subject and object) control and raising constructions in English. These three constructions display both interesting similarities and differences between English and Korean, and thus, they may be used as a testing ground to determine how L1 knowledge and intervention effects interact in terms of L2 acquisition. A total of fifty-four Korean-speaking adults were asked to identify the null infinitival subjects in English constructions involving (1) Subject control (e.g., John promised Mary to join the club), (2) Object control (e.g., Jane persuaded Brian to leave the school), and (3) Raising across an experiencer (e.g, Tom seems to Susan to be cooking). The results showed that their performance was the best with the object control, followed by the subject control, and the worst performance was shown with the raising sentences. These findings suggest that the learners find those constructions difficult that manifest intervention effects, such as subject control and raising sentences, but the difficulty with subject control is modulated by the L1 knowledge as the same construction exists in their L1 Korean.

L2 Acquisition of Raising Revisited: The Role of the Experiencer Phrase

( Jinsun Choe ) 대한언어학회 2018 언어학 Vol.26 No.2

The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 26(2), 21-38. This study presents two experiments with native Korean-speaking adults, the results of which concern the role of the experiencer phrase in their acquisition of English raising constructions. In the first experiment, 101 Korean learners of English were asked to identify the null infinitival subjects in English raising constructions containing a medial or a fronted experiencer phrase. The results showed that the participants’ performance was better when the experiencer was moved to the beginning of the sentence. The second experiment, an acceptability judgment task with twenty-eight Korean-speaking adults, demonstrated that an experiencer phrase is not permitted in Korean raising constructions, regardless of its position. This suggests that the results of the first experiment do not reflect the influence of L1 grammar. Thus, the L2 learners’ difficulty with medial experiencer phrases may be better explained by the notion of intervention effects reported in previous works, rather than by L1 transfer.

L2 Learners’ Resolution of PRO in English Control Constructions

Jinsun Choe 담화·인지언어학회 2020 담화와 인지 Vol.27 No.1

This paper explores how Korean-speaking English learners comprehend control constructions in English. Specifically, it aims to look at how they resolve different types of PRO: PRO in adjunct control (e.g., John met Mary after tripping on the sidewalk), PRO in subject control (e.g., Tom promised Bill to join the club), and PRO in object control (e.g., Kelly told Wendy to leave the room). A total of one hundred and five L2 learners participated in a multiple-choice task, in which they were asked to choose the antecedent of the null infinitival subjects in English control constructions. The results revealed that the learners showed a fairly good performance on all types of PRO, while the best performance was shown for object control sentences, followed by adjunct control and subject control sentences where there was no difference between the two. These findings are discussed in terms of interference effects observed in first/second language acquisition and processing as well as the influence of the learners’ first language, Korean.

Interpretation and Processing of Null and Overt Pronouns in Korean

Jinsun Choe 담화·인지언어학회 2021 담화와 인지 Vol.28 No.1

This paper investigates whether Korean null pronouns are biased towards subject reference and overt pronouns towards object reference as predicted by the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH; Carminati 2002), initially proposed for Italian. In particular, in order to distinguish whether pronoun resolution is governed by syntactic or information structure factors, we manipulate word order (canonical SOV vs. scrambled OSV) and the pronoun type (null vs. overt), as well as the kind of temporal connective used between clauses. One hundred and thirty-three native Korean-speaking adults participated in a multiple-choice questionnaire, in which they were asked to choose the antecedent of the null or overt pronoun. The results reveal that while limited support for the PAH is found, there is a strong preference for the subject antecedent for both null and overt pronouns, even for the scrambled sentences, suggesting that syntactic factors play a greater role in the resolution of pronouns in Korean.

Intervention Effects in the Comprehension of English Raising Constructions by Korean Learners

Jinsun Choe 한국언어학회 2016 언어 Vol.41 No.4

This paper investigates how Korean learners of English comprehend English raising constructions with a fronted experiencer (e.g., To Mary, John seems to be happy). Previous work on the acquisition of raising has shown that raising constructions pose a challenge not only to L2 learners but even to early L1 learners. However, L1 acquisition studies have recently found that there are cases in which this difficulty is considerably alleviated - for example, by moving the experiencer to the beginning of the sentence. This study therefore examines whether the position of the experiencer has the same (facilitating) effect on L2 learners" comprehension of English raising constructions as it does on L1 comprehension. A total of fifty-five Korean college EFL learners participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that tested their comprehension of raising constructions, and the results showed that they were significantly better at comprehending the construction with a fronted experiencer than the one with an intervening experiencer. Such findings parallel the pattern of raising acquisition in L1 English, indicating the presence of intervention effects in both L1 and L2 acquisition.

Online Resolution of Subject Pronouns in Korean

Jinsun Choe 담화·인지언어학회 2022 담화와 인지 Vol.29 No.1

한국어의 주어 인상 구문 `―것 같다`: 존대 일치 현상에 관한 수용성 판단을 중심으로

최진선 ( Choe Jinsun ) 대한언어학회 2017 언어학 Vol.25 No.2

This study aims to investigate the availability of subject-to-subject raising movement in the -kes kathta construction by making use of the subject honorification properties in Korean. A total of 107 Korean-speaking adults participated in a judgment task where they were asked to rate the acceptability of various sentences, including -kes kathta constructions with or without the honorific marker -si-. As expected, participants were most likely to accept sentences in which the use of -si- is triggered by the honorific subject noun phrase within the same clause. However, they also showed a tendency to accept the use of -si- on the matrix predicate -kathta, even when there seems to be no (honorific) grammatical subject in the matrix clause, suggesting that the honorific marker agrees with the honorific subject that has raised from the embedded clause to the matrix clause. Thus, these findings point to the possibility of raising movement in Korean, indicating that the embedded subject is able to move out of the clause to the matrix subject position to agree with the honorific marker on the matrix predicate.