• Child Studies in Asia-Pacific Contexts
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.69-80
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• 2013

The present study examined balanced bilingual children's cognitive and affective perspective-taking and compared them to that of monolingual children. A total of 133 children aged 4 to 5 years and consisting of 73 Korean-English bilinguals and 60 Korean monolinguals were tested with cognitive perspective-taking and affective perspective-taking tasks. Balanced bilinguals were screened through general language ability tests in both English and Korean. Participant backgrounds were collected through a parent questionnaire. Results showed significant differences in affective perspective-taking between bilingual and monolingual children, demonstrating that bilingual children outperformed monolingual children. Although there was no difference in cognitive perspective-taking between bilinguals and monolinguals, the result showed that children's cognitive perspective-taking ability develops with age. This study provides basic information about bilingual children's perspective-taking ability and their bilingual advantage.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 2006

This study examined the spontaneous utterances of 20 1-2 year old Korean-Chinese children in Yanji, China by videotaping their spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her caregiver for 30 minutes on 4 separate occasions. Utterances were transcribed and coded by nominative and accusative case markers; then analyzed by grammatical functions. Results showed that the order and pattern of the acquisition of the case marking system of Korean-Chinese bilinguals differed from that of Korean monolinguals. Bilinguals used the accusative marker -lul earlier than the nominative marker-ka and overextended the accusative marker more often than the nominative marker. These results are consistent with those of Gathercole (in press) who found that bilingual children differed from monolinguals in mastering grammar.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2019

Korean (L1)-English (L2) bilingual adults' and children's production of Korean and English stops was examined to determine the age effects and L2 experience on the development of L1 and L2 stop contrasts. Four groups of Seoul Korean speakers (experienced and inexperienced adult and child groups) and two groups of age-matched native English speakers participated. The overall results of voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) of phrase-initial stops in Korean and word-intial stops in English showed a delay in the acquisition of L1 due to the dominant exposure to L2. Significantly longer VOT and lower F0 for aspirated stops as well as high temporal variability across repetitions of lenis stops were interpreted to indicate a strong effect of English on Korean stop contrasts for bilingual children. That is, the heavy use of VOT for Korean stop contrasts shows bilingual children's attention to the acoustic cue that are primarily employed in the dominant L2. Furthermore, inexperienced children, but not adults, were shown to create new L2 categories that are distinctive from the L1 within 6 months of L2 experience, suggesting greater independence between the two phonological systems. The implications of bilinguals' age at the time of testing to the degree and direction of L1-L2 interaction are further discussed.