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 paper reports results from two types of priming experiments (i.e., masked and cross-modal priming experiments) which compare Chinese L2 learners’ morphological processing of a Korean verbal suffix -ko with adult native speakers of Korean. L1/L2 differences were found in both the masked and cross-modal priming experiments: Full priming effects were found in the masked priming experiment and partial priming effects in the cross-modal priming experiment in L1, while weak or no priming effects were found in both types of priming experiments of L2. These findings indicate that L2 learners of Korean are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and dependent on the lexical storage of the full form. This study also provided evidence for the non-difference between the masked priming and the cross-modal priming experiments both in L1 and L2.
This paper explores the absence or presence of CP ellipsis in Japanese and Korean. Saito (2007) argues that in Japanese and Korean, arguments such as DPs and CPs can undergo ellipsis unlike in English since agreement is optional in these languages. He further puts forward an LF copying analysis of argument ellipsis. A couple of puzzles, however, need to be resolved. First, no extraction out of CP ellipsis should be explained. Second, the fact that CP ellipsis is sensitive to selection of matrix verb should be explained. We suggest that apparent DP and CP ellipsis in Korean are all instances of a null pronoun, the so-called pro. We reanalyze the apparent instances of DP and CP ellipsis discussed in Saito (2007), and propose that they indeed involve deep anaphora pro but not surface anaphora ellipsis.