This paper aims to explore how Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers process Korean final ending -ko. Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers from Yanbian participated in the masked priming experiments through a word judgment task. The masked priming experiments were designed to compare the subjects’ response under three different prime-target conditions: Identical Condition, Unrelated Condition, and Test Condition. The participants’ response time in the experiments was statistically analyzed in two different ways: i.e., subject (F1) analyses and item (F2) analyses. The results of both the subject analyses and the item analyses revealed full priming effects, as is usually found in native speakers’ morphological processing. These findings indicate that Chinese-Korean bilingual speakers are sensitive to each combining morpheme of morphologically complex words including Korean final ending -ko and their processing of the words are not dependent upon the lexical storage of the full form.

This paper investigates Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers’ processing of Korean plural marker -tul. It employed masked priming experiments with a word judgment task for Korean-Chinese speakers from Yanbian, China. The masked priming experiments compared the subjects’ response time in three different prime-target pairs: identical condition, unrelated condition, and test condition. The data of the experiments was analyzed in two different ways: subject analyses and item analyses. The subject analyses of the study showed partial priming effects and the item analyses full priming effects. These findings indicate that Chinese-Korean bilinguals seem to be sensitive to morphological structure of a morphologically complex words in Korean and less dependent on the lexical storage of the full form, as is usually found in L2 learners’ morphological processing.

This study quantitatively investigates foreign learners" acquisition of double particles in Korean. Some of the particles in Korean are jointly used with other particles and some are not, and the sequence of the particles determines the grammaticality of the double particles. Chinese and Japanese learners of Korean participated in the experiment in which they were asked to judge the grammaticality of a combination of a noun and double particles. The participants" judgment of the grammaticality of the double particles and their reaction time for the judgment were analyzed. The results of the study revealed that Japanese learners whose native language has a particle system similar to that of Korean performed better in the grammaticality judgment than Chinese learners whose native language shows no use of double particles. The advanced learners of Korean, regardless of their native languages, showed better judgment on the grammaticality of the use of double particles. This study also found that the type of double particles also affected the learners" judgment and that in the grammaticality judgment of ungrammatical joint of adverbial particles, most of the participants, regardless of their native languages and their Korean proficiency, scored much lower than in the judgment of the other types of double particles. The analyses of the participants" reaction time for the judgment showed congruent results with those of their grammaticality judgement.