A study on the comprehension of sentences with Korean Hangul, Chinese Hanja and HangulㆍHanja scripts among Korean-Chinese children and adolescents
AUTHOR : 윤혜경,박혜원,권오식
INFORMATION : page. 105~119 / 2009 Vol.16 No.1
ABSTRACT
This study was undertaken in order to analyze sentence comprehension, especially the propositional representation of sentences in Korean script, Hangul and Chinese script Hanja. The sentence-picture matching tasks developed for notebook computers using the Super-lab program were used to measure automatically the reading time and the correct response rate. One hundred and three Korean-Chinese bilingual subjects who were either 5th graders or college students participated in this experiment. The result showed that the reading time of Hanja sentences was shorter than that of Hangul or Hangul․ Hanja sentence in both ages. This result wasinterpreted as the result of the immediacy of meaning which occurs in Hanja script. However, the correct response rates in the matching tasks were the same,regardless of the script types in both ages. This suggests that the ability to comprehend sentences, especially the propositional representation in a sentence, is almost the same in Hangul, Hanja and Hangul․Hanja sentences in both ages. It differs only in terms of age. The results were discussed in terms of the abstraction of meaning which is the nature of a propositional representation in a sentence and the comprehension process of Hangul and Hanja sentence amongst bilingual Korean-Chinese subjects.