Word order preferences for direct and indirect objects in children learning Korean.

Full Abstract

Pre-school Korean children typically manifest higher comprehension rates on the 'unmarked' SOV sentences of their language than on the 'scrambled' OSV patterns. To date, however, scant attention has been paid to children's ordering preferences with respect to direct and indirect objects. The results of an act-out comprehension experiment involving 40 subjects (aged 4;0 to 7;0) show a strong, statistically significant preference for the accusative-dative order, despite evidence that the reverse order is more common in mother-to-child speech. Two hypotheses are considered, one involving the relationship between word order and grammatical relations and the other involving the relationship between word order and the types of situations denoted by the sentences in question. The results of a follow-up study involving transitive verbs with instrument arguments provide strong evidence in favour of the latter hypothesis.

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Author information

Author/s: Cho, Sookeun (S); Lee, Miseon (M); O'Grady, William (W); Song, Minsun (M); Suzuki, Takaaki (T); Yoshinaga, Naoko (N);

Affiliation: Korea University.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Journal of child language (J Child Lang), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Nov; vol 29 (issue 4) : pp 897-909

Dates: Created 2002/12/10; Completed 2003/01/10; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12471978, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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