Earticle

This study investigated offline and online comprehension of Korean locative alternation by Chinese-speaking second language (L2) learners of Korean. An acceptability judgment task and an online self-paced reading task were conducted with Chinese learners of Korean at higher- and lower-proficiency levels along with a control group of native Korean speakers. The outcomes of the acceptability judgment task showed that both L2 groups acquired the knowledge of Korean locative alternation. The results from the self-paced reading task demonstrated that native speakers and highly proficient L2 learners, but not learners with lower proficiency, showed sensitivity to the mismatch between case marking and verb semantics in their processing of locative constructions. These findings suggest that proficient Chinese speakers can process Korean locative constructions in a native-like manner, inconsistent with the claim that L2 processing is substantially different from native speaker processing.

The current study examined Korean EFL learners’ use of English relative clauses (RCs) in essays with a special focus on proficiency-specific characteristics. The overall frequency distribution of RCs, RC structural types, and RC-related errors were examined by comparing two different levels of learner corpora and the native speaker corpus. The findings reveal native speakers’ more frequent use of RCs compared with learners and the overall proficiency effect on the number of RC uses. In terms of RC structural types, native speakers and learners were more alike than different, and regardless of proficiency level, learners’ use of RC structural types showed supporting evidence for Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977). The numbers and types of RC-related errors were different depending on learners’ proficiency levels. From these findings, some useful pedagogical implications are drawn and discussed for level-specific English RC instructions.

This paper aims to consider the shallow structure hypothesis through empirical findings. Based on their work on some syntactic domains(syntactic ambiguity and syntactic dependency), Clahsen and Felser propose the shallow structure hypothesis that the real-time sentence processing of non-native learners is qualitatively different from that of native speakers. It means that non-native learners compute shallower and less detailed syntactic representations than native speakers do during sentence comprehension. To investigate the validity of hypothesis the results of their long distance wh-dependency study, which is most closely associated with the hypothesis, are discussed in the paper. Even though the hypothesis has much effect on the field of second language acquisition, there exists a disparity between the hypothesis and empirical evidence.

본 연구에서는 이해 기반 구조적 점화 패러다임을 사용하여 성인 한국어 학습자가 인접 통사구조인 수여구문과 비인접 통사구조인 관형절 문장에 노출된 뒤 후속문장에 대한 처리에 어떤 양상을 나타내는지 살펴보고, 이들의 통계적 학습 능력이 L2 통사구조의 암시적 학습과 처리 효율성에 어떤 영향을 미치는지를 규명했다. 아울러 인접구조와 비인접구조에 대한 한국어 학습자의 통계적 학습 능력이 인접 L2 통사구조와 비인접 L2 통사구조의 처리․학습에 차별적으로 영향을 미치는지 여부 또한 고찰했다. 한국어 학습자 39명을 대상으로 이해 기반 구조적 점화 실험을 실시한 결과, 어휘 의존적 점화와 어휘 독립적 점화 모두 관찰되지 않았다. 그러나 인접구조에 대한 통계적 학습 능력은 인접 L2 통사구조 표적문장 이해 정확도를 예측해주었으며, 비인접구조에 대한 통계적 학습 능력은 인접․비인접 L2 통사구조 표적문장에 대한 처리 효율성과 이해 정확도를 예측해주었다. 이는 성인 L2 학습자의 인접․비인접 구조에 대한 통계적 학습 능력이 각각 그에 상응하는 인접․비인접 L2 통사구조의 처리 효율성을 촉진하는 데 기여함을 시사한다.

This study investigates whether priming during comprehension occurs in learners of Korean as a second language (L2) when prime and target sentences share the same adjacent or nonadjacent L2 syntactic dependencies as well as how statistical learning ability is related to the processing and learning of L2 syntactic structures. Participants performed statistical learning tasks involving adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies along, and read sentences containing Korean dative alternations (an adjacent L2 dependency) and adnominal clauses (a nonadjacent L2 dependency) in a self-paced reading task. The results revealed that prime sentences did not enhance the speed of reading times for the regions of interest in target sentences containing adjacent and nonadjacent L2 syntactic structures. However, individual differences in learning nonadjacent dependencies statistically predicted processing efficiency for both types of L2 sentences, whereas those in learning adjacent dependencies only predicted processing efficiency for the relevant type of L2 sentences. These findings suggest an overlap between both types of statistical learning ability and the relevant types of L2 sentence processing.

How humans' language processing occurs in the brain in real-time has been one of the major issues to clarify in the field. Especially, it is interesting to see related to the issue how bilinguals do in their second language (L2) processing as compared to monolinguals of the language. This study conducts an event-related potential (ERP) study to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic processing in bilinguals. The experiment was done with Korean speakers of English as an L2, divided into two groups depending on their L2 proficiency level. The typical semantic anomaly paradigm was adopted for the material; semantically anomalous sentences end with a word which is not congruent in the sentence context. It was investigated if semantically anomalous stimuli elicit N400, known as meaning-related ERP component since Kutas & Hillyard (1980). Overall, similar pattern of the N400 effect was observed in the high proficiency group, while no significant effect was found in the low proficiency group. Though the results do not show a complete match in every detail, the study suggests that the bilinguals' semantic processing resembles monolinguals' semantic processing to a significant extent. This study also suggests that proficiency has a close correlation with brain responses in semantic processing in L2.

Syntactic facilitate effects have been observed with a stimulus on subsequent processing of the same or related structure in numerous studies. The current study aims to investigate how ESL university students undergo the syntactic process of English dative structures, double object datives(DO) and prepositional datives(PD) through eye-tracking approach. Applying syntactic priming to sentence comprehension paradigm, the eye-tracking data have been examined by comparing the structure-matching and structure-mismatching condition between priming stimuli and subsequent target sentences. Sixty four Korean EFL learners with English proficiency at a high intermediate level participated. The results showed that more robust effects have been observed in PD than in DO. With regard to the sentence components, the main effects occurred mainly in critical AOIs, NP2 and NP3 areas.

Most previous studies in psycholinguistics investigating whether bilingual lexical access is non-selective have employed experimental tasks which require the bilingual participant to explicitly activate their two languages or routinely switch between the two. The present study examines bilingual lexical processing through a semantic association task which includes stimuli in only one language and therefore avoids creating an artificial bilingual context. The bilingual participants were unconscious of a hidden character repetition when the English words are translated into their native language, Korean. Results showed significant interference effects of the hidden character repetition in the behavioral data reflected as both longer response times and higher error rates. These findings support and extend the findings of previous studies showing significant ERP modulations due to implicit activation of the first language and suggest that bilingual lexical processing is nonselective: bilingual speakers unconsciously and automatically activate their native language when reading words in their second language.

A theoretically interesting aspect of noun-noun compounds is how two nouns in the compounds are conceptually combined to be interpreted. Along this line of semantic interpretation, previous first research found a relation priming that the processing of a noun-noun compound is facilitated by previous exposure to another compound particularly when the two compounds share the same first constituent and the same semantic relation (Gagne & Shoben 1997). However, it is controversial whether the relation priming emerges even when two compounds (e.g., orange juice ? chocolate cake) have only the same semantic relations but not share a constituent (Estes, 2003; Gagne, Spalding, & Ji, 2005). In order to expand research base of compound processing, this study investigates whether first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers demonstrate relation priming particularly when two compounds have the same relations, yet do not have any identical constituent. In an online lexical sense decision task, an L1 and an L2 group were asked to judge whether a series of compounds had a sensible interpretation. Results showed that neither L1 nor L2 speakers did yield the effect of relation priming, suggesting that sharing the same semantic relations may not be a sufficient condition to observe the activations of relational structures of compounds.

Experience with a first language shapes the processing of phonetic input. Acoustic information that is used to cue phonological distinctions in the first language is weighted more heavily. Correspondingly, acoustic information not used to cue phonological distinctions comes to be systematically under-attended. In the domain of perception, Guion and Pederson (in press) investigated the plasticity of the attentional system with regard to processing novel acoustic cues. The acoustic information used by native speakers of a tone language, naïve speakers of non-tone languages, and adult learners of a tone language was investigated. The adult learners were found to have retuned their phonetic processing to attend to acoustic cues employed by tone languages. In the domain of production, Lee, Guion, and Harada (in press) investigated the relationship between acoustic cues used in first language prosody and the production of English unstressed reduced vowels. Korean-English and Japanese-English bilinguals who began learning English before the age of 6 or after the age of 15 were studied. The early bilingual groups were nearly native-like but showed some characteristics that could be attributed to first language processing. The late bilinguals were less native-like but, nonetheless, exhibited productions closer to native-like norms than would be predicted by the transfer of the first language phonological system alone. These results indicate that early learners can learn to attend to acoustic cues not used in the phonology of their first language and, thus, develop productions that come close to native norms. Late learners, on the other hand, show evidence of perceptual plasticity, but are less likely to attain native-like production norms than early learners.

This study investigates online semantic integration patterns of second language (L2) speakers in processing familiar compounds in comparison with those of first language (L1) speakers. Particularly, adopting the Competition-Among-Relations-In-Nominals theory (Gagne & Shoben 1997, 2002) as a theoretical framework, this study examines whether L1 and L2 speakers demonstrate relation priming, in which previous exposure to a compound (e.g., tennis court) facilitates the processing of a subsequent compound (e.g., tennis shoes) which has the same first constituent and the same semantic relation. In an online lexical sense decision task, an L1 and an L2 group were asked to judge whether familiar compounds, operationalized as the existence in a large English corpus, had a sensible interpretation. Results revealed the effect of relation priming in both L1 and L2 group, indicating that a modifier in a compound plays a key role in online semantic integrations of two constituents in the compound. The finding also suggests that compound processing requires an obligatory process of selecting the interpretable relations between two nouns to establish a unified representation. An implication for the architecture of the lexicon was also discussed in relation to lexicalized and novel compounds.

Sentences involving negation and quantifiers can introduce ambiguity, and speakers from different languages often exhibit varying preferences for scope interpretation. This study investigated to what extent Chinese- and Russian-speaking children, who learned Korean as a second language (L2), demonstrate native-like scope interpretations. Additionally, we examined whether their interpretive biases in L2 were modulated by various processing factors, including L2 word retrieval speed, L2 proficiency, and working memory. Results from truth-value judgment tasks revealed that the learners displayed interpretation patterns that closely resembled those of native Koreanspeaking children. Furthermore, the L2 children were less likely to converge on native-like interpretations as they encountered greater challenges in L2 word retrieval. In contrast, neither their L2 proficiency nor working memory capacity modulated the learners’ scope interpretation tendencies. The findings suggest that the ability to efficiently retrieve words from memory may play a significant role in L2 scope interpretation, lending support to the hypothesis that lexical processing can impact sentence comprehension.

This study investigates whether L2 learners employ similar processing strategies as native speakers when disambiguating attachment of a relative clause (RC) in Korean as a second language (KSL). Different processing strategies were tested with temporarily ambiguous sentences containing RCs when the head NP is a complex NP (NP1 of NP2), in which either NP1 (low attachment, LA) or NP2 (high attachment, HA) can be an antecedent. The RCs were controlled for length (short vs. long) and position-sentence initial (scrambled word order) vs. sentence medial (canonical word order). ?Native speakers consistently showed a clear HA preference regardless of the length or the position of the RCs, whereas KSL learners showed a clear LA preference. The attachment differences between L1 and L2 are discussed in terms of transfer and prosodic sensitivity.

The present study explores whether or not L2 learners' real time grammatical processing differs from adult L1 speakers'. According to the Shallow Structures Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, b), nonnative speakers (NNS) access only shallow representations during processing. This study tests the prediction made by the SSH more concretely, by investigating antecedent priming effects at intermediate gap positions during the processing of long distance wh-dependencies in L2 English, using a semantic priming task. High level NNSs showed crucial asymmetries: They responded faster to clause?edge probes related to antecedents than those to subjects, but not otherwise. Low level NNSs’ reaction times were flat. They produced no reading-time asymmetries suggestive of intermediate traces or priming effects at gap position, unlike NSs under the same stimuli. In contrast, antecedent-priming at clause edge was discovered, suggesting intermediate traces left by cyclic movement. Priming effects at clause edge are prima facie reflexes of intermediate traces in NNS processing, suggesting that it is grammatically based.

일본의 대학에서 유학생이 학습 연구 활동을 진행시키는데 있어서, 패러프레이즈는 빼놓을 수 없는 언어 기술의 하나이며, 그 지도의 필요성이 지적되고 있다. 본 연구에서는 패러프레이 즈에 관한 교육 방법의 제안을 위한 기초 연구의 하나로서, 일본어 학습자의 패러프레이즈 사용 실태를 파악하는 것을 목적으로, 고유일본어(和語) 동사에서의 패러프레이즈에 주목하여 두 가 지의 조사를 행하였다. 우선 한 가지는, 어떠한 문장을 읽고 내용을 요약하는 경우의 패러프레이즈에 대해서, 그리고 또 한 가지는, 고유일본어 동사를 포함한 단문에서의 명사구 패러프레이즈에 대한 것이다. 그 결과 다음과 같은 점을 알 수 있었다. 첫 번째, 학습자는 모국어화자에 비해, 고유일본어 동사 패러프레이즈의 비율이 낮다는 점, 즉, 원문을 그대로 옮기는 경향을 보였다. 두 번째로, 학습자 가 내용을 요약할 때는 패러프레이즈의 오용이 거의 없었음에도 불구하고, 단문에서는 명사구 패러프레이즈의 오용이 현저했다. 본 연구로, 한자권 학습자라해도 고유일본어 동사에서의 패러프레이즈가 쉽지 않다는 것, 특 히 명사구 패러프레이즈가 어렵다는 것이 밝혀졌다.

This study investigated how L2 Korean advanced learners process regularly and irregularly inflected forms of Korean verbs, and whether this processing mechanism follows a single mechanism account or a dual mechanism account. In addition, it examined the effect of the learner’s working memory capacity on the reaction time or/and the accuracy rate in the chosen priming tasks. The patterns of facilitation on present tense verb targets were examined in three experiments. In the study, there were 72 participants with TOPIK level 6, who performed three lexical decision tasks with either a masked visual prime presented during 43ms (Experiment 1) or 230ms (Experiment 2) or an auditory prime (Experiment 3). Next, the priming for six different types of verbal inflections were compared: regular verbs with no orthographical or phonological changes, regular verbs with only phonological changes to their stem, regular verbs with only orthographical changes, irregular verbs with their stem omitted or alternated, irregular verbs with changes in their endings and irregular verbs with changes in both their stem and endings. The study found determined that (i) no priming effects in either regular or irregular inflections revealed in most conditions, which supports a single mechanism account, and (ii) the influence of working memory capacity of L2 learners showed as higher the working memory was, faster the reaction time was completed in those cases.

제2언어(L2)로 영어를 학습하는 한국인 성인들을 대상으로 영어 규칙 동사와 불규칙 동사의 과거형이 점화어, 원형이 표적어인 자극제시시간차(SOA) 60ms의 차폐점화실험을 실시하였다. 실험결과 규칙 동사의 경우 표적어에 대한 실험조건의 반응시간이 동일조건의 반응시간과 유의미한 차이가 없었으며, 무관련조건의 반응시간보다는 유의미하게 짧았는데(동일조건 RTs = 실험조건 RTs < 무관련조건 RTs), 이는 실험조건의 점화어인 규칙 과거형(boiled)이 처리 과정에서 어간(boil)과 접사(-ed)로 분해되어 표적어인 원형 위치에서 원형을 반복 제시한 것과 같은 반복점화효과가 나타났음을 의미한다. 반면, 불규칙 동사 과거형의 경우 표적어에 대한 반응시간이 동일조건, 실험조건, 무관련조건 순으로 유의미하게 길어졌는데(동일조건 RTs < 실험조건 RTs < 무관련조건 RTs), 이는 실험조건의 점화어인 불규칙 동사 과거형에 대해서는 규칙 동사 과거형에서와 같은 형태론적 분해(morphological decomposition)가 진행되지 않았음을 의미한다. 이러한 실험 결과는 L2 형태처리에서 규칙형과 불규칙형의 표상/처리 방식이 상이하다는 것을 보여주는 증거로서, 형태론적 복합어의 처리 모형들 중 형태론적 분해와 복합어 전체에 대한 직접 접속의 두 가지 가능성을 모두 열어두는 이원메커니즘 모델을 지지하는 것으로 해석될 수 있다.

The present paper investigates how regular and irregular verbs are represented and processed in English as a second language(L2). 39 Korean intermeditate level L2 learners of English (university students) participated in a masked priming experiment designed to examine whether past tense forms are decomposed into their morphological components (stem and affix) in on-line word recognition, or rather processed as a whole-form without such a structural decompoisition. The results of the experiment demonstrate that morphological decomposition is applied only to the past tense forms of regular verbs (boiled → boil+ed); past tense forms of irregular verbs (held) appear to be processed rather as a whole-form without such a structural analysis. These results are compatible with the dual-mechanism approaches which posit different routes for the representation and processing of morphologically complex words, a rule- based and a memory-based computation. The single-mechanism approaches which assume only memory-based direct access and retrieval of simple as well as complex word forms do not provide a reasonable account for the result of the present study.

본 연구는 이론의 가치를 평가하는 객관적인 준거에 근거하여 VanPatten의 입력처리이론을 평가하였다. 입력처리이론에 근거한 교수법은 전통적인 문법교수법이나 의미중심의 발화교수법보다 더 효과가 높으며 구조화된 입력처리 활동이 주요한 요인인 것으로 기존연구에서 보고되었다. 입력처리이론은 실증연구를 통한 입증가능성과 설명의 내적다탕성이 높은 것으로 나타났다. 그러나 외적타당성은 비교적 약하며 이론적 설명의 범위 또한 입력처리에 관련된 부분으로 제한되어 있다. 향후 지속적인 연구의 외연을 넓힌다면 교수환경 내에서 발생하는 제2언어습득의 효과를 검증하는 실증 연구의 이론적 틀로서 계속적으로 획기적인 역할을 할 수 있는 유용한 이론으로 판단된다. 본 논문에서는 특히 입력처리이론이 EFL환경인 한국에서의 영어교육과 제2언어습득이론의 발전을 위해 제공하는 시사점을 논의한다.

This study evaluated VanPatten’s Input Processing Theory, which underpins what is known as Processing Instruction. This review revealed that Processing Instruction is more effective than traditional and meaningful output-based instruction, and this effect results mainly from structured input activity. Input Processing Theory has a high level of empirical verifiability and internal explanatory validity. However, it has relatively weak external validity and its scope is limited to input processing. It is expected to continue playing a monumental role as a theoretical framework for empirical research. Implications are discussed in relation to EFL teaching in Korea and the advancement of instructed second language acquisition theory.