Connecting input to comprehension: First language acquisition of active transitives and suffixal passives by Korean-speaking preschool children
type: CreativeWork
description: A central issue in language acquisition is the contribution of input to the development of linguistic knowledge. In this dissertation project, I investigate the developmental trajectories of two constructions that express transitive events in Korean (active transitives and suffixal passives) for Korean-speaking preschool children. Three major grammatical factors affect interpretation of Korean sentences: word order through the relative position of arguments in a sentence, case marking via designated markers attached to arguments, and voice by way of verbal morphology. Each factor induces particular comprehension heuristics (i.e., a strategic way, acquired probabilistically through exposure, that a comprehender employs in the course of comprehension). Literature on the interaction of the three factors in the acquisition of the two construction types remains relatively thin, particularly for distributional properties of the relevant input and the (asymmetric) contributions of these factors to children’s comprehension. Throughout the dissertation, I made use of corpus analysis through Natural Language Processing techniques and picture selection experiments in order to investigate this issue. I first conducted a semi-automatic analysis of caregiver input using the entire Korean child-directed speech data in the CHILDES database. Four major findings were reported as follows: (1) Of the core constructional patterns with no omission of arguments and case marking, the canonical active transitive occurred far more frequently than its scrambled counterpart, and passives in general were extremely rare, regardless of canonicity. (2) Of the three passive types found in Korean—suffixal (p. 3, (5)), lexical (p. 3, (6)), and paraphrastic (p. 4, (7)), the suffixal passive was the most frequent of all instances of the passive (with or without argument / case marking omission). (3) The degree of association between individual markers and thematic roles in constructional patterns expre…
abstract: A central issue in language acquisition is the contribution of input to the development of linguistic knowledge. In this dissertation project, I investigate the developmental trajectories of two constructions that express transitive events in Korean (active transitives and suffixal passives) for Korean-speaking preschool children. Three major grammatical factors affect interpretation of Korean sentences: word order through the relative position of arguments in a sentence, case marking via designated markers attached to arguments, and voice by way of verbal morphology. Each factor induces particular comprehension heuristics (i.e., a strategic way, acquired probabilistically through exposure, that a comprehender employs in the course of comprehension). Literature on the interaction of the three factors in the acquisition of the two construction types remains relatively thin, particularly for distributional properties of the relevant input and the (asymmetric) contributions of these factors to children’s comprehension. Throughout the dissertation, I made use of corpus analysis through Natural Language Processing techniques and picture selection experiments in order to investigate this issue. I first conducted a semi-automatic analysis of caregiver input using the entire Korean child-directed speech data in the CHILDES database. Four major findings were reported as follows: (1) Of the core constructional patterns with no omission of arguments and case marking, the canonical active transitive occurred far more frequently than its scrambled counterpart, and passives in general were extremely rare, regardless of canonicity. (2) Of the three passive types found in Korean—suffixal (p. 3, (5)), lexical (p. 3, (6)), and paraphrastic (p. 4, (7)), the suffixal passive was the most frequent of all instances of the passive (with or without argument / case marking omission). (3) The degree of association between individual markers and thematic roles in constructional patterns expre…
author: Shin, Gyu-Ho
keywords: Linguistics
date published: 2020-07-07
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:28:42Z
provider: University of Hawaii
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Hawaii at Manoa

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property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/69013