Speech Sciences (음성과학)
- Volume 10 Issue 4
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- Pages.241-254
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- 2003
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- 1226-5276(pISSN)
Korean Sentence Comprehension of Korean/English Bilingual Children
한국어/영어 이중언어사용 아동의 한국어 문장이해: 조사, 의미, 어순 단서의 활용을 중심으로
Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the sentence comprehension strategies used by Korean/English bilingual children when they listened to sentences of their first language, i.e., Korean. The framework of competition model was employed to analyze the influence of the second language, i.e., English, during comprehension of Korean sentences. The participants included 10 bilingual children (ages 7;4-13;0) and 20 Korean-speaking monolingual children(ages 5;7-6;10) with similar levels of development in Korean language as bilingual children. 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 results revealed that both groups of children used the case marker cues as the strongest cue among the three. The bilingual children relied on case-marker cues even more than the monolingual children. However, the bilingual children used animacy cues significantly less than the monolingual children. There were no significant differences between the groups in the use of word-order cues. The bilingual children appeared less effective in utilizing animacy cues in Korean sentence comprehension due to the backward transfer from English where the cue strength of animacy is very weak. The influence of the second language on the development of the first language in bilingual children was discussed.
Keywords
- bilingual children;
- sentence comprehension;
- cross-linguistic differences of cues;
- competition model;
- language transfer