• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.493-503
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• 2018

The present study is a conceptual replication of O'Grady, Lee, and Choo's (2003) earlier study designed to investigate two hypotheses (linear distance hypothesis vs. structural distance hypothesis) in relation to L2 Korean learners' processing of Korean subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in a scholarly attempt to explicate Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH). In addition, the current study is intended to explore any potential role of working memory capacity (WMC) in the processing of Korean subject and/or object RCs. Chinese-speaking learners of Korean taking a language course offered at a local university in Korea participated in this experimental study. Among those recruited, only 23 learners completed the experimental tasks appropriately according to the specific instructions provided on each task, and thus, subsequent statistical analyses were conducted on their data. Fifteen Korean NSs were also recruited for the control group. Two experimental tasks were administerd to the participants: one picture selection task containing the same test items used in O'Grady et al.'s study to measure their processing of subject-object RCs and an operation span (OSPAN) task to measure their WMC. Somewhat differently from O'Grady et al.'s findings, the participating Chinese learners of Korean performed significantly better on object RCs than on subject RCs, seemingly lending support to the linear distance hypothesis. Further analyses, however, suggested that the results in favor of, or relative ease of processing, object relative clauses were due, most likely, to the learners' excessive use of the canonical sentence strategy, which also led to nonsignificant correlations between WMC and learner performance on the picture selection task.