Doctoral dissertation research: Interpretation and Processing of Overt Pronouns in Korean, English, and L2-acquisition

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

American society is becoming more diverse, in part due to the influx of populations with various linguistic backgrounds; linguistic misunderstanding among speakers from different linguistic backgrounds sometimes occurs, with consequences for social interaction. There are many possible sources of linguistic misunderstanding, one of which is the cross-linguistic influence of the first language on the learner's second language. This dissertation project aims to examine the role of cross-linguistic influence in the domain of pronoun resolution. More specifically, this project investigates how Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English pronouns as well as Korean pronouns. Korean and English pronouns are known to have different properties, yet there has been no prior empirical investigation of their differences. By comparing the patterns of pronoun interpretation in Korean and English, this project can provide insights into misunderstandings due to misinterpretation of English pronouns by Korean-speaking learners of English as a second language. This project also has the potential to inform educators, language teaching professionals and developers of language teaching software about learners' pronoun use. This project examines grammatical knowledge and real-time comprehension of pronouns, with a focus on how native speakers of Korean process pronouns in their native language, and how the properties of Korean pronouns influence the way that Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English pronouns. Six experiments with various psycholinguistic methods are conducted to achieve the goals of the study. The first set of experiments use two different offline judgment tasks to measure learners' grammatical knowledge of Korean and English pronouns. The second set of experiments use the eye-monitoring methodology to track the time course of participants' application of grammatical constraints on pronoun resolution during reading, in both Korean and English. This project will contribute to the fields of theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics by providing information on grammatical knowledge and processing in both native and non-native language. Given that Korean is a relatively understudied language, this project furthermore increases the visibility of Korean, and of East Asian languages more generally