Earticle

This paper explores the transitivity bootstrapping hypothesis as a guide for determining telicity in English with Korean speakers. It hypothesizes that telic interpretations are linked to transitive frames and atelic ones to intransitive frames. The predicted pattern of acquisition is that the Korean participants would make errors with atelic transitives and telic intransitives since they are not supported by the hypothesis. The results show that they made the relevant distinction between telic and atelic items for three out of the four transitivity-telicity pairs, failing to do so for telic intransitives. These mistakes with telic intransitives are precisely the pattern predicted by the hypothesis. It confirms that the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis is part of the acquisition toolkit exploited by L2 learners. As for the puzzle of why telic intransitives, but not atelic transitives, were particularly vulnerable to transitivity bias, it is argued to be best explained by the Surface Generalization Hypothesis and prototypicality of telic transitive frames for telicity.

아동들은 통사정보 활용(syntactic bootstrapping)이라는 기제를 통해 문장의 통사를 사용함으로써 새로운 동사의 의미를 학습한다. 어떻게 어린 아동들은 모국어의 문법 규칙을 배우기도 이전에 통사를 통해 동사의 의미를 파악하는 것일까? 통사정보 활용의 발달적 기원에 대한 이론인 구조-대응 설명(structure-mapping account)은 영아들이 문장 내 명사와 개념적 표상의 참여자 역할을 일대일로 대응하려는 선천적인 경향성을 가지고 있다고 제안한다. 이러한 경향성에 기반하여 영아들은 문장 내 명사의 개수를 통해 동사의 논항 구조를 파악할 수 있고, 따라서 동사의 의미의 일부를 파악할 수 있다. 본 논문은 먼저 구조-대응 설명 및 이를 지지하는 기존 연구 결과를 개관하고, 나아가 한국어와 같이 논항이 빈번하게 생략되는 논항 생략 언어가 기존의 구조-대응 설명에 제기하는 도전에 대해 논의하였다. 또한, 최근 진행된 한국어 발달 연구는 아동들이 담화의 연속성에 대한 기대(expectation of discourse continuity)를 토대로 담화 내 여러 문장을 통합하여 동사의 생략된 논항을 파악할 수 있다는 것을 제안하였다. 종합적으로, 이러한 연구 결과를 통해 보완된 구조-대응 기제는 영아들이 문장 이해를 하기 시작할 때부터 문장 구조가 동사 학습에 있어 어떠한 역할을 하는지, 그리고 동사의 논항 이 생략되었을 때에도 어떻게 이러한 학습이 가능한지에 대한 설명을 제공한다.

Children use syntax to guide their verb learning?this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with an innate bias to map nouns in a sentence onto participant roles in an event representation. Armed with this bias, infants interpret the number of nouns accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic structure of the sentence, and therefore, about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, I first review some of the evidence for the structure-mapping account, then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs’ arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges lead investigators to propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb’s arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb’s arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

This paper aimed to identify factors that inhibit effective second language (L2) reading and to suggest technology-enhanced reading designed for providing L2 readers with bootstrapping resources. To this end, this paper also addresses the importance of syntactic and prosodic awareness in L2 reading, drawing on L2 reading theories and a number of empirical studies from a body of research related to L2 development. Syntactic and prosodic awareness contribute to L2 reading development as they are highly associated with fluent and accurate reading abilities. However, it is challenging for L2 learners to acquire syntactic and prosodic knowledge due to limited cognitive capacities related to L2 learning, limited prior linguistic knowledge that is usually gained from oral communication, and linguistic differences between native languages and a target language. Addressing these challenges, this paper reviews a potentially useful technological tool of text presentation technology that may help increase syntactic awareness. Although empirical studies that tested the usefulness of technologyenhanced reading tools produced mixed results, their findings imply a viable alternative way of reading and call for future research to validate it.