• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.35-46
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• 2006

This study investigated whether there are differences between Korean-English bilingual and Korean monolingual children on phonological awareness skills. Participants were 11 Korean-English bilingual children and 12 Korean monolingual children. The children's ages ranged between 6 and 7 years. The results were as follows. First, the bilingual children significantly outperformed monolingual children on overall phonological awareness tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly higher than monolinguals on all three types of phonological awareness tasks (segmentation, deletion, and blending). Second, there was a significant difference between the groups with respect to phonological units of the tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly better than monolinguals on the phonemic unit tasks, but two groups did not differ significantly on syllabic unit tasks. There was an interaction effect between unit size(syllables and phonemes) and group (bilinguals and monolinguals). Third, there were correlations for both bilingual and monolingual children between overall phonological awareness skills and word recognition skills.

• Language and Information
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.67-91
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• 2010

Present study examines L1 transfer effect and UG involvement in the acquisition of binding properties of Korean as second language (L2). The study especially investigates i) whether knowledge from different L1s (English and Chinese) affect the interpretation of binding in Korean as L2 and ii) whether L2 learners of Korean differentiate two Korean anaphors like Korean monolinguals do, based on their knowledge of universal form-function correlation of anaphors. 53 post-puberty L2 learners of Korean with English or Chinese L1, together with 30 Korean monolinguals, were tested over Truth Value Judgment Task with stories, composed of Korean sentences representing various types of binding with two Korean reflexives - caki and caki-casin. The results showed some effect of L1 transfer, though not always. Overall, late L2 learners of Korean seem to know the difference between the two anaphors in their properties related to form-function correlation, though their performance level was lower compared to Korean monolinguals. Detailed pattern of the results and the role of UG in the interpretations of Korean reflexives are also discussed.

• 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.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.13-26
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• 2015

Speech production studies have suggested that bilinguals who are L2-dominant are the most likely to suppress the influence of the first language (L1) on the second language (L2). The voice onset times (VOTs) and fundamental frequencies (f0s) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and Korean were examined to address the question whether cross language influences occur particularly in L2 predominant bilinguals and to compare their outcomes with those of L2 proficient bilinguals and monolinguals. A total of 28 speakers participated in this experiment and they produced English and Korean stops in the carrier sentence. In English, for voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops, L2 predominant bilingual speakers produced VOTs that were significantly shorter than those of monolingual English speakers. The outcome was analogous in Korean speech. For aspirated and lax stops, they produced shorter Korean VOTs than monolingual speakers. The results of f0s were slightly different from those of VOTs. In English, L2 predominant bilinguals produced f0s that were not significantly different from those of monolingual English speakers. In Korean, however, they produced f0s that were significantly different from those of monolingual Korean speakers. Taken VOT and f0 into consideration together, the overall results suggest that, although they tend to show a corresponding pattern of monolinguals, L2 predominant bilinguals had cross language phonetic influences between L1 and L2, similar to L2 proficient bilinguals. Between the two acoustic cues, f0 seemed to be a more reliable cue than VOT to examine the influences.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.55-64
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of bilingualism on children's selective attentional ability by comparing Korean-Chinese bilingual with Chinese monolinguals in China. The subjects were 71 children, 4 and 5 years of age, 38 of whom were bilingual while 33 were monolingual. Bilingual children spoke Korean at home but Chinese in the community and at preschool. The instrument used to measure children's selective attentional ability was DCCST (Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task) and ANT (Attentional Network Test). Results showed that bilingual children were more advanced than monolingual in selective attentional ability.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.21-31
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• 2003

This paper reports our experimental study with Korean-Chinese (=KC) bilinguals as compared with Korean monolinguals. We aim to find KC bilingual speakers' sentence processing strategies, and the interaction between the Ll and U2 grammars in bilingual development. To this end, we recruited 166 subjects of all age groups from age 3 to adult in the Korean autonomous community in Yanji, China, and did a classical subject/actor identification test, where subjects are supposed to pick out the subjects/actor of both sensical and nonsensical sentences (cf. Liu, Bates & Li, 1992). We compared our results with our previous work on monolingual Koreans, and found out that KC bilinguals rely on word order as well as anumacy; that KC bilinguals make use of morphology at age 10 as compared with age 5 for monolinguals; and that KC bilingual adults rely on animacy and word order as well as morphology, while monolingual Korean adults rely solely on morphology for sentence interpretation. Given that animacy and word order play an important role in the Chinese grammar, our finding lends support to the backward transfer which Liu, Bates & Li (1992) propose for early bilingualism.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2011

This study examined the production of aspirated stop consonants in Korean and English words to address how the influences differed particularly in terms of proficiency in L2 English. Voice onset times (VOTs) were measured from two American monolinguals and seven Korean speakers. The results showed that VOT patterns for both L1 and L2 stops differed according to their proficiency in L2 English. In L2 English, high proficient speakers produced VOTs that were similar to those of native speakers of English whereas low proficient speakers produced VOTs that were significantly longer than those of proficient speakers. In L1 Korean and L2 English, most of the proficient speakers produced VOTs similarly. Unlike previous findings, Korean VOTs were even shorter than English counterparts. The VOT shortening of aspirated stops in Korean was found for most of the proficient speakers. The findings of the present study suggest that cross language phonetic influences as well as the ongoing VOT shortening in Korean aspirated stops may be correlated with L2 proficiency. Since this is a pilot study with a small number of subjects for each proficiency group, further quantitative study is necessary to generalize.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.323-355
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• 2015

This study examined grapheme-to-phoneme regularity effect among late Korean-English bilinguals by using whole word level task (lexical processing) and two meta-phonological tasks(sub-lexical processing): [1] English word naming task(whole word level), [2] rhyme judgement task(rhyme level), and [3] phoneme deletion task(phoneme level). Forty-three late Korean-English bilinguals participated in all three tasks. In these tasks, participants showed better performance in regular word conditions compared to irregular word conditions, demonstrating a clear English regularity effect. Post-hoc correlational analysis revealed strong correlation between word naming task and rhyme judgement task, which is different from the results reported with English monolinguals. The contradicting results might be due to the relevantly low English proficiency level among late Korean-English bilingual speakers. In conclusion, this study suggests that late Korean-English bilinguals make use of L2 grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) rule when reading L2 English words.