Second Language Processing of Korean Floating Numeral Quantifiers

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Korean features floating numeral quantifiers (NQs) that can be separated from their modified nouns via scrambling.
• This grammatical structure presents a learnability challenge for Chinese-Korean bilinguals as it's absent in L1 (Chinese) and not easily acquired through input or instruction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if highly proficient Chinese-Korean bilinguals utilize structure-based information for online interpretation of Korean sentences with floating NQs.
• To determine if bilinguals can acquire and apply Korean's specific structural constraint on NQ-NP dependencies.

Main Methods:

• An acceptability judgment task was used to assess bilinguals' knowledge of the structural constraint.
• A self-paced reading task measured sensitivity to violations of the NQ-NP dependency in both local and non-local conditions.

Main Results:

• Highly proficient bilinguals demonstrated target-like knowledge in acceptability judgments.
• Bilinguals exhibited sensitivity to NQ-NP mismatch violations during online reading, irrespective of dependency type.

Conclusions:

• Proficient Chinese-Korean bilinguals can engage in structure-based processing of Korean, even for constructions absent in their native language.
• Findings support the possibility of acquiring and utilizing complex syntactic information in a second language through dedicated processing mechanisms.