This paper examines the putative universality of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) postulated for pro-drop languages by observing the interpretational status of overt and null pronouns in the context of quantified antecedents that contrasts between Korean (pro-drop language) and English (non pro-drop language). In pro-drop languages, an overt pronoun cannot have a bound variable interpretation when the antecedent is a quantified NP (e.g., everyone, someone). Twenty three Korean learners of English took a forced-choice picture task, in which they had to select one of the two pictures that best depicted a sentence they heard that carried ambiguous meanings. Results showed that Korean speakers accepted a quantified antecedent with Korean overt pronoun ku, violating the OPC. The imperfect knowledge of the OPC by Korean speakers was attributed to the influence of the English overt pronoun he on the Korean overt pronoun ku. Pedagogical implications are discussed on the explicit instructions on the meanings of lexicon used in the OPC construction.

This study uses a sentence recall task to investigate syntactic priming effects in English prepositional object dative (PO) or double-object dative (DO) structures by Korean speakers of L2 English. The purposes were (1) to determine whether syntactic priming occurs during L2 production, and if it does, then to determine how it affects the subsequent utterance of target structures; and (2) to determine whether syntactic priming during production is lexically specific or independent. Thirty-two sets of target-prime sentences were developed using 12 dative alternating verbs, creating DO-DO, DO-PO, PO-DO, PO-PO target-prime pairs. Syntactic priming effects occurred with the PO priming irrespective of targets (whether DO or PO) but only when the verb used in the prime was the same as the verb used in the target. The results suggest that lexical dependency of syntactic knowledge during L2 production does not accord with the lemma stratum model. A pedagogical implication of successful learning of lexical entries is discussed.

The present study examines the interpretation of Korean relative clauses (RC) by English speakers of L2 Korean. The purpose of the study is to see if these learners employ the same parsing strategy as native Korean speakers in the processing of a complex NP followed by a RC. Processing strategies were investigated with two different conditions, which were distinguished from each other by animacy presence in the second NP of a complex NP (e.g., chayk-ul ilk-nun apeci-uy atul ‘the son of the father who is reading a book’: [+ani, +ani] condition vs. kyosil-ey iss-nun haksayng-uy chayk ‘the book of the student who is in the classroom’: [+ani, -ani] condition). Korean speakers showed equal preference in the [+ani, +ani] condition, while they showed low attachment (LA) preference in the [+ani, -ani] condition. On the other hand, English speakers showed LA preference in both conditions. We assume that this LA preference by the English speakers might have been due to either the universal processing principle (recency) or influence from their L1, both of which make the same attachment site. The source of the Korean speakers diverging behavior is discussed on the basis of difference in verb meaning used in each condition. The discrepancy between the two language groups leads us to propose that English speakers do not rely on the same processing strategies as Korean speakers.

This study investigates whether L2 learners employ similar processing strategies as native speakers when disambiguating attachment of a relative clause (RC) in Korean as a second language (KSL). Different processing strategies were tested with temporarily ambiguous sentences containing RCs when the head NP is a complex NP (NP1 of NP2), in which either NP1 (low attachment, LA) or NP2 (high attachment, HA) can be an antecedent. The RCs were controlled for length (short vs. long) and position-sentence initial (scrambled word order) vs. sentence medial (canonical word order). Native speakers consistently showed a clear HA preference regardless of the length or the position of the RCs, whereas KSL learners showed a clear LA preference. The attachment differences between L1 and L2 are discussed in terms of transfer and prosodic sensitivity.