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.

The purpose of this study is to explore one bilingual person’s language development in relation to the changing environments in which she has lived. Bronfenbrenner's (1977, 1979, 1992) bioecological model provided insight as a theoretical framework in that the model emphasizes active interactions and strong interconnectedness between the individual and her surrounding environments, as well as interactions among environments (micro, meso, exo, and macrosystem). As a main data source, a two and half hour semi-structured interview was conducted with the participant, who is a Korean-English bilingual pursuing a graduate degree at an American university. The analysis of the interview data revealed that 1) the participant's developing characteristics (e.g., outgoing personality, age of language learning), 2) the changing environments (e.g., parents’ belief and philosophy, home residential location), and 3) the interactions between the participant and her environments (e.g., the participant’s intrinsic motivation and the mother’s philosophy) and interactions between inner and outer environments (e.g., school system and national educational policy) played out for the participant's reach on the current language development in Korean and English.

This study investigated the family size effect on English word processing via visual lexical decision task with three different groups of speakers, i.e., L1 English speakers, Korean L2 English learners, and English bilinguals. For English simple nouns, verbs, and adjectives, we examined the effects of the type count of morphologically related members and the surface base-frequency on lexical processing. First, results showed that the family size effect emerged in Korean L2 learners, but it was mostly inhibitory. To be specific, words with a large family size elicited slower response latencies than those with a small family size. However, the facilitatory effect arose for bilinguals and native speakers of English. Second, it was exhibited that high-frequency base words were recognized more quickly than low-frequency counterparts, confirming that token frequency as well as type frequency codetermines their recognition latency. These findings suggest that L1, bilinguals, and L2 learners' mental lexicons are organized by morphologically related words along with surface frequency although their effect size differs depending on the amount of language exposure. Finally, building on the results in the current experimental study, we propose a formal account for the processing advantages of words with a large family size under a psycholinguistic model and processing constraints.