Limits on the Agent-First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• The Agent-First strategy, a heuristic mapping the first noun to the agent role, is often considered a universal cognitive bias in language comprehension.
• Its automatic application in children's language acquisition has been widely assumed across various languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interplay between the Agent-First strategy and grammatical cues (argument number, case-marking) in Korean, an SOV language.
• To determine how these cues influence children's comprehension of transitive constructions under varying conditions.

Main Methods:

• Children's comprehension of Korean transitive constructions was tested in a novel experimental setting.
• Acoustic masking was used to obscure arguments and case markers to varying degrees.
• Performance was analyzed based on the presence and clarity of grammatical cues.

Main Results:

• Children showed weak Agent-First interpretation in noun-verb patterns lacking case-marking, indicating uncertainty.
• Comprehension significantly improved with additional grammatical cues.
• The impact of cues was asymmetric, varying by child's age and cue alignment.

Conclusions:

• The Agent-First strategy is not applied automatically in isolation for Korean-speaking children.
• Effective comprehension of transitive constructions requires the integration of the Agent-First strategy with other interpretive cues, such as case-marking.
• Developmental factors and cue alignment influence the reliance on different linguistic strategies.