It is generally assumed that morphological system can differ considerably among languages. Inflected noun and verb forms, for example, vary cross-linguistically: In isolating languages like Chinese, words are mainly uninflected, whereas in agglutinati ...
It is generally assumed that morphological system can differ considerably among languages. Inflected noun and verb forms, for example, vary cross-linguistically: In isolating languages like Chinese, words are mainly uninflected, whereas in agglutinative languages like Japanese and Korean, rich and transparent inflectional morphology is employed. It has also been proposed that difference in processing inflections hinges on the typology of morphological systems (Hankamer, 1989). A related issue is how L2 learners display processing of inflectional morphology in relation to their L1: in particular, if L1 and L2 are typologically similar, like Japanese and Korean, or typologically distant from each other, like Chinese and Korean. In this regard, we aim at exploring the effect of two typologically very different L1s, Chinese and Japanese, on the on-line morphological processing of Korean nominal and verbal suffixes. In the psycholinguistics literature, there are at least two alternative ways to recognize morphologically complex words: (i) Decomposition model: recognition of an inflected word involves decomposing it into a stem plus suffixes (Pinker & Ullman, 2002), (ii) Full-listing model: every inflected word is recognized as a monomorphemic whole word (McClelland & Patterson, 2002). To address this issue, the present study investigates morphological processing of inflected nouns vs. verbs by L1 Koreans and by L2 learners of Korean.
Some of the particles in Korean are jointly used with other particles and some are not, and the sequence of the particles determines the grammaticality of the double particles. Chinese and Japanese learners of Korean participated in the experiment in which they were asked to judge the grammaticality of a combination of a noun and double particles. The participants' judgment of the grammaticality of the double particles and their reaction time for the judgment were analyzed. The results of the study revealed that Japanese learners whose native language has a particle system similar to that of Korean performed better in the grammaticality judgment than Chinese learners whose native language shows no use of double particles. The advanced learners of Korean, regardless of their native languages, showed better judgment on the grammaticality of the use of double particles. This study also found that the type of double particles also affected the learners' judgment and that in the grammaticality judgment of ungrammatical joint of adverbial particles, most of the participants, regardless of their native languages and their Korean proficiency, scored much lower than in the judgment of the other types of double particles. The analyses of the participants' reaction time for the judgment showed congruent results with those of their grammaticality judgement.