The Role of Semantic and Syntactic Knowledge in the First Language Acquisition of Korean Classifiers

언어의미(言語意味)와 통사지식(統辭知識)이 아동의 언어 발달에 미치는 역할 : 국어(國語) 분류사(分類詞) 습득(習得) 연구

The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of semantic and syntactic knowledge in the first language acquisition of Korean classifiers. The elicited classifiers production test(EPT) was conducted to 105 children aged from 2 to 7. EPT consisted of 16 classifiers and two items for each classifier. 32 items were divided into 2 major semantic features: animacy and inanimacy. The semantic features of inanimacy were subcategorized into 3 features such as neutral, shape and function. The results revealed that; 1) children produced the correct structure of classification from the very early age with correct word order of the noun phrase showing early fundamental syntactic knowledge; 2) The earliest response pattern was to respond to all nouns in the same way using a neutral classifier showing no apparent semantic basis for their choice; 3) Children didn't show any preference for animate, shape, or function classifiers.