아동의 복문(複文) 이해의 발달 - 시간 절부사어의 '전'과 '후'를 중심으로 -

Development of the comprehension of complex sentences in Korean Children

This research examined the development in Korean children of the comprehension of complex sentences. The relative difficulty in comprehension of the temporal conjunctions "before" and "after" was investigated. The order of mention, contextual support, and syntactic appearance was controlled. The role of cognitive strategies and developmental changes in the comprehension of these conjunction was included in this study. Subjects were 90 preschool children between 3 and 5 years of age. The task was a sentence-picture matching problem having 3 types of sentences combining temporally with "before" or "after". The results were that developmental changes in comprehension of the temporal conjunctions "before' and "after" in Korean children depended on the order of mention, contextual support, and such syntactic factors as the position of the subject of the sentence. The importance of the consistency in the occurrence of events and the order of mention in the acquisition of complex sentences among Korean children is similar to the acquisition of complex sentences in other languages.