• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.131-141
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• 2003

Recently, researchers have been debating whether Korean children exhibit a verb bias or not. Since verbs are perceptually and structurally more salient in Korean language, it has been questioned whether these differences in the Korean make a difference in the pattern of noun and verb acquisition of Korean children. Although language structures may vary between Korean and English, universal cognitive constraints play an important role in early vocabulary acquisition. Several recent studies have examined the noun and verb acquisition of Korean children. However, their conclusions regarding the noun versus verb bias have still been inconclusive. In this paper, previous studies investigating Korean children's noun versus verb bias are examined. Methodological issues are mentioned and results were reinterpreted as favoring the noun bias for one-year-old Korean children.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.279-307
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• 1990

The present research inverstigates the nature of contextual effects on pronoun reference resolution during text comprehesion.Through three experiments,this research examines how various contextuall informations influence on reference resolution and interact with syntactic variables.In experiment 1,the local context was controlled by biasing the pronoun-sentence context towards a certain preceding referent.The lexical decision time and the forced choice time for the correct referent were measured.The results showed that the local contexts have clear effect on reference resolution.The effects of syntactic ambiguity were also observed though the local context was biased towards a certain referent noun.In experiment 2,the global context effect was examined by introducing the text-thematic context in a preceding sentence while keeping the following pronoun-sentence context neutral.The results showed that the global thematic context bias towards a subject or object in a preceding sentence entails a faster response time than the thematically neutral context.In experiment 3,another aspects of context effects were inverstigated by manipulating the consistency of the preceding thematic context with the following pronoun-sentence context.The results showed that the lexical decision responses and forced referent choice responses were faster when the prethematic context and the post-anaphoric context match than when they mismatch.In sum,the overall results of three experiments of this research indicates that context has a clear effect on pronoun reference resolution during text comprehension.