L1 and L2 processing of empty subjects in control constructions
(Top) At the 22nd East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference in Honolulu, HI, USA in February 2023
(Bottom) At the 30th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in Vancouver, Canada in March 2023
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
L1 and L2 acquisition of negated disjunction
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]
(Top) At the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development in Boston, MA, USA in November 2023
(Bottom) At the 17th meeting of the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition in Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA in May 2024
L1 acquisition of pre-subject 'only'
At the child center, where we conducted an experiment (under the supervision of Dr. Kamil Deen)
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
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:
Arslan, S., Kim, S. Y., Lee, S., Lee, M., Lee, S., Lee, Youngin, Cho, C., Yeom, H., & Cho, S. W. 2022. Processing of evidentiality in Korean. In Proceedings of the Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea
Arslan, S., Kim, S. Y., Lee, S., Lee, M., Lee, S., Lee, Youngin, Cho, C., Yeom, H., & Cho, S. W. Processing of evidentiality in Korean. The Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea Conference, Seoul, Korea, November 5th, 2022 [Slides]
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:
Lee, Youngin, Jung, S. J., Lee, K., Lee, S., Jang, H., & Cho, S. W. 2021. Direct pragmatic language skills in Korean-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder. Korean Journal for Infant Mental Health (KJIMH), 14(2), 1-27.
Lee, Youngin, Lee, S., Jung, S., Lee, K., Chung, S., & Cho, S. W. The selective impairment of direct speech acts in Korean young children with autistic spectrum disorder. The Korean Association of Language Sciences, Seoul, Korea, August 19th, 2021
Lee, K., Jung, S. J., Cho, S. W., Lee, Youngin, Lee, S., Yoo, H., Shin, Y. J. A Pitch analysis of the spontaneous speech in Korean toddlers with autism spectrum disorder. The 17th World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) World Congress, Brisbane, Australia, June 22-26th, 2021
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:
Lee, Youngin. 2014. Coherence in Young Children’s Storytelling. In Proceedings of Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea, pp. 67-87.
Lee, Youngin. 2012. Coherence in Young Children’s Storytelling. M.A. Thesis at the Sogang University, Korea.
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:
Lee, Youngin, Lee, H., Koo, M., & Cho, S. W. 2015. Korean Semantic Similarity Measures for the Vector Space Models. Journal of the Korean society of speech sciences, 7(4), 49-55
Yang, H., Lee, Youngin, Lee, H. J., Cho, S. W., & Koo, M. W. 2015. A Study on Word Vector Models for Representing Korean Semantic Information. Journal of the Korean society of speech sciences, 7(4), 41-47.