Research

L1 and L2 acquisition of negated disjunction

My most recent work 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:

(Top) At the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development  (BUCLD48) in Boston, MA, USA in November 2023

(Bottom) At the 17th meeting of the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA17) in Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA in May 2024

Processing of Korean control constructions

(Top) At the 22nd East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference (IGSC22) in Honolulu, HI, USA in February 2023

(Bottom) At the 30th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK30) in Vancouver, Canada in March 2023

When processing English control sentences, such as 'John promised Mary PRO to wash,' comprehenders immediately utilize verb information to associate controller (antecedent NP John) with controllee (the invisible embedded subject PRO). However, in Korean, verb information is delayed until the end of the sentence, making immediate use of verb information impossible. Consequently, Korean comprehenders may rely on alternative cues. In this project, under the supervision of my advisor Dr. William O'Grady and Dr. Amy J. Schafer, I investigate Korean comprehenders' online comprehension of control constructions using a timed stop-making-sense task and two untimed tasks, an acceptability judgment task and a coreference judgment task. Results indicate that Korean comprehenders immediately utilize morphosyntactic cues to identify the antecedent of PRO.

Project outputs:

L1 acquisition of pre-subject 'only'

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:

At the child center, where we conducted an experiment (under the supervision of Dr. Kamil Deen)

Other projects

Processing of evidentiality in Korean and Turkish

Evidentiality is a grammar form that marks information sources from which a speaker knows events in his/her statement. Korean obligatorily marks this form in their grammars via inflectional forms that are suffixed to finite verbs. In this project, we investigate whether evidentiality processing is affected in healthy aging, and if so, how far declining working memory and source memory capacities contribute to evidentiality processing difficulty in aging. For this purpose, we conducted a word-by-word reading experiment in order to investigate how evidentiality processing is modulated in healthy aging in a life-sample group of Korean adults in the 18-80 age range.

Project output:

Development of speech acts and prosody

It has been reported in the literature that children with autistism spectrum disorder (ASD) are largely impaired in their communicative use of language. Certain skills such as commenting, acknowledging the listener, and requesting information were completely absent while other speech acts including responding to questions and requesting objects or actions and protesting were present (Cho, 2003; Hong et al., 2010). This project seeks to determine the extent to which direct pragmatic intent is properly delivered in the utterances produced in a structured setting by Korean young children with and without autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).

Project outputs:

Acquisition of a story grammar and null subject in child Korean

Stories are told everywhere across various culture and communities in the world for thousand of years. Previous studies indicate that stories have an underlying structure called a story grammar (Strong, 1998), and that it begins to develop at around four years of age (Peterson and McCabe, 1983). In this project, I examined how coherence develops in Korean-speaking young children’s storytelling skills. 27 Korean children aged 5 to 7 were told a story and asked to retell it. The data were analyzed in terms of both global and local coherence, which involved the story structure with a focus on purposiveness on one hand, and subject ellipsis on the other.

Project outputs:

Development of the human-robot dialog interface

In this interdisplinary research project to develop of the human-robot dialog for patients dementia, we argue that, in determining semantic similarity, Korean words should be recategorized with a focus on the semantic relation to ontology in light of cross-linguistic morphological variations. Our results indicate that languages must be analyzed by varying methods so that semantic components across languages may allow varying semantic distance in the vector space models.

Project outputs: