Miseon Lee

A SUBJECT-OBJECT ASYMMETRY IN THE ACQUISITION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN KOREAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

A variety of studies have reported that learners of English as a second language find subject relative clauses easier to produce and comprehend than direct object relatives, but it is unclear whether this preference should be attributed to structural factors or to a linear distance effect. This paper seeks to resolve this issue and to extend our understanding of SLA in general by investigating the interpretation of subject and direct object relative clauses by English-speaking learners of Korean, a left-branching language in which subject gaps in relative clauses are more distant from the head than are object gaps. The results of a comprehension task conducted with 53 beginning and intermediate learners point toward a strong preference for subject relative clauses, favoring the structural account.

Agrammatic aphasic production and comprehension of unaccusative verbs in sentence contexts.

This study examined the Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis (ASCH, [J. Neuroling. 16 (2003) 151]), by investigating agrammatic aphasic comprehension and elicited production of two types of intransitive verbs (i.e. unergatives and unaccusatives) in sentence contexts. The ASCH attributes production difficulty frequently observed in agrammatic aphasia to the argument structure entries of verbs, stating that verbs with a more complex argument structure (in terms of the number and type of arguments) are more difficult for agrammatic aphasic patients to produce than those with a less complex argument structure. Results showed that eight agrammatic aphasic subjects had production difficulty with unaccusative verb sentences, as compared to unergatives, in the face of near-normal comprehension of both sentence types. These findings support the ASCH that predicts production difficulty with sentences involving unaccusatives with more complex argument structures. Error patterns observed also indicated successful lemma access in that the full array of verb argument structures were produced during sentence attempts, suggesting that complex argument structures hinder appropriate processing after the lemma level.

AN EMERGENTIST PERSPECTIVE ON HERITAGE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

It is widely recognized that the processor has a key role to play in creating and strengthening the mapping between form and meaning that is integral to language use. Adopting an emergentist approach to heritage language acquisition, the current study considers the extent to which the operation of the processor can contribute to an account of what is acquired, what is subsequently retained or lost, and what is never acquired in the first place. These questions are explored from two perspectives. First, morphosyntactic phenomena for which there is apparently substantial input are considered, with a focus on the relevance of salience, frequency, and transparency to the establishment of form-meaning mappings. Second, a phenomenon for which there appears to be relatively little input (i.e., scope) is examined with a view to understanding its fate in heritage language acquisition. In both cases, the emergentist perspective appears to offer promising insights into why heritage language learners succeed—and fail—in the way that they do.

Dissociations among functional categories in Korean agrammatism.

This study investigated the hypothesis that the syntactic trees formed by individuals with agrammatic aphasia cannot be constructed any higher than an impaired node as suggested by the tree-pruning hypothesis (Friedman, 1994; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and hypothesis. It also examined their following implication that the members of a certain functional category are subject to the same degree of impairment. Two experiments were conducted to investigate a Korean agrammatic patients use and understanding of three functional categories--Mood, Tense, and Complementizer. The results showed a dissociation among functional categories that preserves the higher node while leaving the lower node impaired both in production and comprehension. Another dissociation was found among members of the same category depending on their linear position in the clause. These results contrast with the predictions of the tree-pruning hypothesis, suggesting that the nearer to the end of the clause a functional element is located, the better it is preserved in Korean agrammatism.

A Mapping Theory of Agrammatic Comprehension Deficits.

This paper offers evidence for the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis, which holds that individuals with agrammatic aphasia tend to have difficulty comprehending sentences in which the order of NPs is not aligned with the structure of the corresponding event. We begin by identifying a set of constructions in English and Korean for which the IMH makes predictions distinct from those of canonical order and trace-based theories of agrammatic comprehension. Then, drawing on data involving the interpretation of those patterns by English-speaking and Korean-speaking agrammatics, we argue for the conceptual and empirical superiority of the isomorphic mapping account.