Research

When processing English control sentences such as 'John promised Mary __ to wash,' comprehenders immediately utilize control information from the matrix verb (promise) to associate the antecedent NP John (controller) with the infinitival empty subject (controllee). However, in verb-final languages like Korean, verb information only becomes available at the end of the sentence, making immediate use of verb information impossible. 

In this project, under the supervision of my advisor Dr. William O'Grady and Dr. Amy J. Schafer, I investigated (i) whether L1-Korean comprehenders draw on morphosyntactic cues early in the sentence to interpret infinitival empty subjects in Korean complement control constructions, and (ii) how L1-English comprehenders and L1-Korean L2ers of English interpret adjunct infinitive control constructions in English, with a particular focus on purpose clauses (e.g., Sarah hired Tim __ to finish the work quickly). 

Findings revealed that (1) complementizer cues facilitate the interpretation of empty subjects in Korean control constructions even without control verbs, and (2) L2 participants, even highly advanced learners, exhibited greater variability than L1-English participants in interpreting empty subjects. Moreover, the L2 group was also more sensitive to task type. Their comprehension was less consistent in online tasks than offline tasks, whereas the L1 group performed consistently across tasks.

Project outputs:

• Lee, Youngin. (forthcoming). L1 and L2 processing of English adjunct control. The 50th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD50), Boston, USA, November 9th, 2025 [Poster]

• Lee, Youngin. Processing of Empty Subjects: Evidence from Control Constructions (Dissertation, May 2025)

• Lee, Youngin. The processing of filler-gap dependency in Korean control constructions. The 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2024), Ann Arbor, USA, May 17th, 2024 [Poster]

• Lee, Youngin. Integration of morphosyntactic information in incremental processing: evidence from Korean control sentences. The Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing - Asia (AMLaP Asia) 2023, Hong Kong, China, December 3rd, 2023 [Poster]

• Lee, Youngin. Examining incremental sentence processing in Korean: the case of control constructions. The 4th International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics (ICTEAP-4), Seoul, Korea, August 17th, 2023 [Slides]

• Lee, Youngin. 2023. The role of complementizers in Korean subject and object control Constructions. In Proceedings of Japanese/Korean Linguistics 30

• Lee, Youngin. The use of complementizer for comprehension of Korean control constructions. The 22nd East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference (IGSC22), Honolulu, USA, February 18th, 2023

Another strand of my research focuses on L2 acquisition of negated disjunction. I have been working on this project under the supervision of Dr. Bonnie D. Schwartz from the Department of Second Language Studies at UHM. The interpretation of negated disjunction (e.g., The pig didn't eat the carrot or the pepper) varies cross-linguistically (Szabolcsi, 2002). For instance, negation scopes over disjunction (NOT>OR) in English ("The pig ate neither"), whereas disjunction scopes over negation (OR>NOT) in Japanese ("The pig ate either, but not both"). O'Grady, Lee, and Lee (2011) found that Korean native speakers appear to allow both interpretations, although NEG>OR predominated. Addressing methodological concerns in that research (e.g., pragmatic infelicity), this L2 study on Korean negated disjunction employs a modified TVJT with two critical conditions (NOT>OR story vs. OR>NOT story), presenting stimuli bimodally (aural-written) in future tense.

Project outputs:

• Lee, Youngin. (Accepted). How adults interpret disjunction under negation in native and nonnative Korean. To appear in Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, Special Issue: New Frontiers and Connections in Second Language Acquisition: Selected Proceedings of the 17th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA-17). [Peer-reviewed]

• Lee, Youngin & Schwartz, B., D. (2024). Negated disjunction in (native and) nonnative Korean. In Proceedings of the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD48), pp. 299-312.

• Lee, Youngin. How adults interpret disjunction under negation in native and nonnative Korean. The 17th meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA17), Urbana Champaign, USA, May 3rd, 2024 [Poster]

• Lee, Youngin & Schwartz, B, D. Negated disjunction in (native and) nonnative Korean. The 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD48), Boston, USA, November 3rd, 2023 [Talk] [Slides]

Children are known to misinterpret pre-subject only (e.g., "Only the cat got a car”) as if it were preverbal only (e.g., "The cat only got a car”). Though numerous theoretical explanations have been put forward (Crain, 1992;1994, Patterson et.al., 2006, Gualmini et al., 2003, Hohle et al., 2009, Kim, 2012, Hackl et.al., 2015, a.o.), we show that the reported challenge of pre-subject-only is in fact methodological in origin - previous studies failed to satisfy a crucial felicity requirement of only: to extract a subset from an established superset of referents. We use a modified TVJT (Crain & Thornton, 1998) to show that when this felicity condition is properly met, children are able to interpret pre-subject-only correctly.

Project outputs:

• Deen, K., Brennan, P., Chang, Y-T., Daniels, R., Lee, Youngin., Lin, K.,  Ohba, A., Reddy, A., Tang, A., Tonoike, S., Topelian, A., Wang, J., Yusa, M. & Zubiri, L, A. Subsets from supersets: How children correctly interpret pre-subject only. The 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD48), Boston, USA, November 3rd, 2023 [Poster]

• Paper in prep