The development of sentence interpretation in Korean: the influence of three cues
AUTHOR : 황민아, 안혜진
INFORMATION : page. 39~54 / 2002 Vol.9 No.2
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the sentence comprehension strategies used by Korean-speaking individuals within a framework of competition model. Three- to seven-year-old children and adults participated in the study. In an act-out procedure, the children were asked to determine the agent in sentences composed of two nouns and a verb with varying conditions of three cues(case-marker, animacy, and word-order). The 3-year-old children exhibited a strong reliance on animacy cues as they tended to select animated nouns as the agents. For the 3-year-olds, case-marker cues were the next strong cues followed by word-order cues. The adults relied most on case-markers followed by animacy cues then by word-order cues. As the children\'s ages increased, the strength of case-marker cues increased while the strength of animacy cues declined. The 4- and 5-year-olds used case-marker cues and animacy cues equivalently. By the age 6, children relied more on case-markers than on animacy cues. For all age groups, word order cues influenced on sentence comprehension only to a small extent. The pattern of sentence interpretation in Korean-speaking children and adults appeared to be consistent with the expectations based on the competition model.