Keep calm and move on: 'Good-enough' processing of clausal constructions in Korean

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• The good-enough processing account proposes two cognitive streams for sentence parsing: a heuristic stream (less effortful) and an algorithmic stream (deep, costly).
• Real-time sentence comprehension involves balancing these streams, but their interaction, particularly in non-Indo-European languages, remains under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interplay between heuristic and algorithmic parsing streams in Korean sentence comprehension.
• To examine how language-specific properties, such as word order and morphology, modulate parsing strategies.

Main Methods:

• Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted with native Korean speakers.
• Experiment 1 focused on the suffixal passive, comparing verb-initial and verb-final conditions.
• Experiment 2 examined the morphological causative across different word-order conditions.

Main Results:

• No significant difference in reading times was observed at the verb region for the suffixal passive.
• A significant difference in spill-over region reading times was found for the suffixal passive, favoring verb-final order.
• Consistent reading times were observed across word-order conditions for the morphological causative.

Conclusions:

• Findings suggest that heuristic parsing often takes precedence over algorithmic parsing when processing challenges arise.
• Language-specific features, including word order and verbal morphology in Korean, significantly influence the balance between parsing streams.
• This research contributes to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension and cross-linguistic variation.