• Language and Information
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.39-56
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• 2009

This paper investigates ordering alternation phenomena in Korean using the dative construction data from Sejong Corpus of Modern Korean (Kim, 2000). The paper first shows that syntactic weight and information structure are distinct and independent factors that influence word order in Korean. Moreover, it reveals that heaviness and givenness compete each other and exert diverging effects on word order, which contrasts the converging effects of these factors shown in word orders of right-branching languages like English. The typological variation of syntactic weight effect poses interesting theoretical and empirical questions, which are discussed in relation to processing efficiency in ordering.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2017

In an English multiple Wh-construction with two wh-words, only a higher-located wh-word in a sentence structure is allowed to pre-pose to the Spec of CP, which has been known as a Superiority Effect(SE). Contrary to English, Korean and Japanese have been known not to respect SE, and this phenomenon has been called an Anti-Superiority Effect(ASE). Recent studies including Takita et al(2007) and Harada(2015) among others, however, have suggested exceptional cases to ASE in Japanese, and attempted to explain them through a feature checking mechanism within the Minimalist Program(MP) by Chomsky(1995, 1998). Such explanations of MP, which are based on the abstract feature checking system, have recently been considered just as a kind of technicalia and should be backed up with further empirical evidence. In this paper, I show that there are also exceptions to ASE in Korean, and the exceptional cases to ASE both in Korean and Japanese can be well explainable based on the empirical evidence of Korean/Japanese morpho-syntax.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

Previous research on syntactic processing shows that the interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence is frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another. The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on the production of disambiguating prosody for English ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, 40 speakers gave default readings of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences. Questioning was used to prove intended meanings behind default readings. Intended meanings were treated as interpretation biases when a majority of speakers read a sentence with the same intended meaning. The size of the majority was used to establish bias strength. In Experiment 2, 10 speakers were instructed to use prosody to disambiguate given alternate meanings of the sentences from Experiment 1. The results indicated an effect of bias strength on disambiguating prosody: speakers used temporal juncture cues to reliably disambiguate alternate meanings for sentences with a weak interpretation bias, but not for those with a strong bias. Overall, the results indicated that interpretation biases strongly affect the production of prosody.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.97-116
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• 1995

This study was conducted to investigate how syntaction and pragmatic constraints influence the sentential representation and memory accessibility. In order to seperate the syntactic constraints from the pragmatic constraint from the pragmatic constraints,the syntactic role of constituent in the sentence (subject or object) and the order of mention(first or second) were manipulted.After each sentence was presented by RSVP procedure,the probe recognition time was measured to investigate memory accessibility.In Experiment 1,in which SOA interval was 255ms,it was found that the subject of a sentece were more accessible than the object and participants first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later.However, in Experiment 2,in which SOA interval was 1540ms,it was found that participants mentioned first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later while there was no significant difference between the subject and object of a sentece.These results suggest that the syntactic and pragmatic constraints have an independent effect on the initial senential representation at the early stage of constructing representation,but as time passes only the pragmatic constraints influence sentential representation.These results also support a theoretical position which assumes that sentential representation is constructed through the process of convergent statisfaction of multiple constraints.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.35-43
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• 1999

This paper aims to research the language changes in modern Korean and its effect to the language processing systems. In modern Korean. the syntactic constructions l like [Adnominal Ending + Bound Noun ( + Postposition)] are changing into the morphological constructions, and some of these constructions are reflected in the written language. For example. the syntactic construction [Ad nominal Ending + '-de (Bound N Noun)' (+ Postposition) ) co-exists with the mixed form '-neunde' and [Adnominal Ending + 'geot' (Bound Noun) + '-j' (Postposition)) does with ' neunge'. These constructions are used frequently in the spoken language. As like other verbal endings, these forms also participate in the construction of the complex sentence, and these forms have its own case function fused into themselves So, the analytic approach to these forms can make great effect on the automatic morphological analysis systems. automatic tagging systems. and the syntactic analysis systems. So. in the design phase of a language processing systems, the language change phenomena like these must be taken l into consideration.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.469-499
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• 2016

The present study investigated the cognitive mechanism underlying online processing of Korean syntactic (for example, A bed/a clock belongs to/doesn't belong to the furniture "침대는/시계는 가구에 속한다/속하지 않는다") and lexical negation (for example, A tiger/a butterfly has/doesn't have a tail "호랑이는/나비는 꼬리가 있다/없다") using an ERP(Event-related potentials) technique and a truth-value verification task. 23 Korean native speakers were employed for the whole experiment and 15's brain responses (out of 23) were recorded for the ERP analysis. The behavioral results (i.e. verification task scores) show that there is universal pattern of the accuracy and response time for verification process: True-Affirmative (high accuracy and short latency) > False-Affirmative > False-Negated > True-Negated. However, the components (early N400 & P600) reflecting the immediate processing of a negation operator were observed only in lexical negation. Moreover, the ERP patterns reflecting an effect of truth value were not identical: N400 effect was observed in the true condition compared to the false condition in the lexically negated sentences, whereas Positivity effect (like early P600) was observed in the false condition compared to the true condition in the syntactically negated sentences. In conclusion, the form and location of negation operator varied by languages and negation types influences the strategy and pattern of online negation processing, however, the final representation resulting from different computational processing of negation appears to be language universal and is not directly affected by negation types.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.117-149
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• 2004

The paper is to argue against the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis of Old English, according to which finite verbs invariably undergo movement into a clause-final T within subordinate clauses and reach the functional head C within main clauses. The asymmetric CP-V2 analysis, first of all, faces difficulty in explaining a wide range of post-verbal elements within subordinate clauses. To resolve the problem, the analysis has to abandon the obligatoriness of V-to-T movement or introduce various types of extraposition whose status is dubious as a legitimate syntactic operation. Obligatory V-to-T movement in Old English lacks conceptual justification as well. Crosslinguistic evidence reveals that morphological richness in verbal inflection cannot entail overt verb movement. Moreover, the operation is always string-vacuous under the asymmetric CP- V2 analysis and has no effect at the interfaces, in violation of the principle of economy. The distribution of Old English finite verbs in main clauses also undermines the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis. Conceptually speaking, a proper syntactic trigger cannot be confirmed to motivate obligatory verb movement to C. The operation not only gets little support from nominative Case marking, the distribution of expletives, or complementizer agreement but also requires the unconvincing stipulation that expletives as well as sentence-initial subjects result from string-vacuous topicalization. Finally, textual evidence testifies that Old English sometimes permits non-V2 ordering patterns, many of which remain unexplained under the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.27-40
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• 2020

In this paper, we investigate the correlation between the amount of English sentences that Korean English learners (L2ers) are exposed to and their sentence processing patterns by examining what Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) language models (LMs) can learn about implicit syntactic relationship: that is, the filler-gap dependency. The filler-gap dependency refers to a relationship between a (wh-)filler, which is a wh-phrase like 'what' or 'who' overtly in clause-peripheral position, and its gap in clause-internal position, which is an invisible, empty syntactic position to be filled by the (wh-)filler for proper interpretation. Here to implement L2ers' English learning, we build LSTM LMs that in turn learn a subset of the known restrictions on the filler-gap dependency from English sentences in the L2 corpus that L2ers can potentially encounter in their English learning. Examining LSTM LMs' behaviors on controlled sentences designed with the filler-gap dependency, we show the characteristics of L2ers' sentence processing using the information-theoretic metric of surprisal that quantifies violations of the filler-gap dependency or wh-licensing interaction effects. Furthermore, comparing L2ers' LMs with native speakers' LM in light of processing the filler-gap dependency, we not only note that in their sentence processing both L2ers' LM and native speakers' LM can track abstract syntactic structures involved in the filler-gap dependency, but also show using linear mixed-effects regression models that there exist significant differences between them in processing such a dependency.