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We investigate Korean-speaking children’s knowledge about clause-level constructions involving a transitive event – active transitive and suffixal passive – through corpus analysis and Bayesian modelling. The analysis of Korean caregiver input and children’s production in CHILDES revealed that the rates of constructional patterns produced by the children mirrored those uttered by the caregivers to a considerable degree and that the caregivers’ use of case-marking was skewed towards single form-function pairings (despite the multiple form-function associations that the markers manifest). Based on these characteristics, we modelled a Bayesian learner by employing construction-based input (without considering lexical information). This simulation revealed the dominance of several constructional patterns, occupying most of the input, and their inhibitory effects on the development of the other patterns. Our findings illuminate how children shape clause-level constructional knowledge in Korean, an understudied language for this topic, as a function of input properties and domain-general learning capacities, appealing to the usage-based constructionist approach.

This study investigated the effects of construction types on Korean-L1 English-L2 learners’ verb–construction integration in online processing by presenting the ditransitive and prepositional dative constructions and manipulating the verb’s association strength within these constructions. Results of a self-paced reading experiment showed that the L2 group spent longer times in the verb–construction integration in the postverbal complement region when processing the ditransitive construction, which is less canonical and highly avoided in the learners’ L1, than when processing the prepositional dative construction, which is more canonical and shares similar structural features with the L1 counterpart. In the following spillover region, L2 learners showed faster reading times as proficiency increased when the verb was strongly associated with the prepositional dative construction. Our findings expand the scope of current models on L2 sentence processing by suggesting that construction types and L2 proficiency may affect the L2 integration of verbal and constructional information.

We examine how Korean heritage speakers (KHSs) in the United States, the minority population using Korean at home and English in daily life, understand their cultural identity and conflicts in their adolescence and college periods. While recognized as “model minority” with their academic and socioeconomic achievements, KHSs have been understudied and underrepresented regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. Drawing on qualitative data collected from interviews with 24 KHSs, we find that KHSs establish their cultural identity after extensively experiencing cultural confusion and conflicts with their parents, peers, and the society. KHSs need more emotional support and practical information that help understand their heritage language and culture. We conclude this article with a discussion on cultural identity, conflicts, and support programs for KHSs.

This study examines the relationship between learning environments and learning outcomes in acquiring Korean as a language target. We compare two learner groups residing in the United States: English-speaking learners of Korean in foreign language contexts versus Korean heritage speakers. Both groups share English as their dominant language and receive similar tertiary-level instruction, yet differ in their language-learning profiles. We measure two groups’ comprehension behaviour involving Korean subject−predicate honorific agreement, focusing on two conditions manifesting a mismatch between the honorifiable status of a subject and the realisation of the honorific suffix in a predicate. Results from the acceptability judgement task revealed that (1) both learner groups rated the ungrammatical condition as more acceptable than native speakers did, (2) Korean heritage speakers rated the ungrammatical condition significantly lower than English-speaking learners, and (3) overall proficiency in Korean modulated learners’ evaluations of the ungrammatical condition in opposite directions between the groups. No between-group difference was found in the infelicitous-yet-grammatical condition. Results from reaction time measurement further showed that Korean heritage speakers responded considerably faster than English-speaking learners of Korean. These results underscore the critical role of broad usage experience—whether through home language exposure for heritage language speakers or formal instruction for foreign language learners—in shaping non-dominant language activities.

Attraction effects arise when a comprehender erroneously retrieves a distractor instead of a target item during memory retrieval operations. In Korean, considerable processing difficulties occur in the agreement relation checking between a subject and an honorific-marked predicate when an intervening distractor carries a non-honorific feature. We investigate how attraction effects are managed during the processing of Korean subject-predicate honorific agreement by two Korean-speaking groups with different language use experience backgrounds: college students and airline workers. Results showed that both groups demonstrated stable knowledge of the honorific agreement in the acceptability judgment task. In the self-paced reading task, the airline group, who used honorifics extensively in their workplace, was less affected by the attraction effect than the student group. Our findings suggest that long-term language use experience can modulate how language users manage potential influence from attraction effects in real-time sentence processing.

Based on usage-based constructionist approaches to language development, this study investigates the validity of constructional complexity as a predictor of writing proficiency of Korean EFL learners. We analyzed argumentative essays produced by Korean EFL learners and compared a prediction model that uses English argument structure constructions with a conventional T-unit-based model. We first tested the predictive power of a discriminant function model with argument structure constructions as predictors for assessing writing proficiency of lower- and higher-level learners. We then compared the construction-based model to another model that included T-unit measures as predictors. The results validated the contribution of argument structure constructions for predicting L2 writing proficiency: The construction-based model yielded higher prediction accuracy than the T-unit-based model did, confirming that constructional complexity is closely aligned with writing proficiency. These findings demonstrate the significance of a construction-based model as a reliable tool for diagnosing EFL learners’ writing proficiency.

A central issue in language acquisition is the contribution of input to the development of linguistic knowledge. In this dissertation project, I investigate the developmental trajectories of two constructions that express transitive events in Korean (active transitives and suffixal passives) for Korean-speaking preschool children. Three major grammatical factors affect interpretation of Korean sentences: word order through the relative position of arguments in a sentence, case marking via designated markers attached to arguments, and voice by way of verbal morphology. Each factor induces particular comprehension heuristics (i.e., a strategic way, acquired probabilistically through exposure, that a comprehender employs in the course of comprehension). Literature on the interaction of the three factors in the acquisition of the two construction types remains relatively thin, particularly for distributional properties of the relevant input and the (asymmetric) contributions of these factors to children’s comprehension.Throughout the dissertation, I made use of corpus analysis through Natural Language Processing techniques and picture selection experiments in order to investigate this issue. I first conducted a semi-automatic analysis of caregiver input using the entire Korean child-directed speech data in the CHILDES database. Four major findings were reported as follows:(1) Of the core constructional patterns with no omission of arguments and case marking, the canonical active transitive occurred far more frequently than its scrambled counterpart, and passives in general were extremely rare, regardless of canonicity.(2) Of the three passive types found in Korean—suffixal (p. 3, (5)), lexical (p. 3, (6)), and paraphrastic (p. 4, (7)), the suffixal passive was the most frequent of all instances of the passive (with or without argument/case marking omission).(3) The degree of association between individual markers and thematic roles in constructional patterns expressing a transitive event was asymmetric: the nominative case marker was a very strong cue for agenthood (and vice versa), the accusative case marker was a moderately good cue for themehood (and vice versa), and the dative marker was not likely to occur with the agent (and vice versa).(4) When two overt arguments are attested in active transitives, the NOM-marked argument tends to occur before its ACC-marked counterpart.I also carried out a series of picture selection experiments, by devising a novel methodology in which parts of test sentences were obscured by way of acoustic masking with child-friendly contexts. Given the experimental setting (i.e., reversible stimuli with two animate arguments), it was found that three factors—word order, case marking, and voice—interacted with one another in children’s comprehension of the two constructions in the following ways:(1) The word-order-related heuristic (Agent-First) operates reliably only in conjunction with other grammatical cues such as the presence of a second argument and case marking.(2) The case-marking-related heuristics (NOM-as-Agent; ACC-as-Theme), which apply locally to a single noun, work more reliably for comprehension than the word-order-related heuristic (Agent-First).(3) The voice-related heuristics (Theme-First; DAT-as-Agent) are less influential in comprehension than the word order and case marking heuristics, which frequently override them.Children’s performance in this experiment was interpreted in combination with input properties and postulated features of a child processor. By and large, characteristics of each comprehension heuristic mirrored properties of caregiver input, which suggests a close connection between what children are exposed to and how knowledge related to these factors emerges and grows. Despite the scope of investigation (i.e., patterns expressing transitive events with animate agents and themes), the nature of input provided a reasonably clear indication that children develop particular heuristics in relation to each factor and apply them to comprehension. This finding aligns well with usage-based and emergentist approaches to language development, pointing towards a substantial contribution of input to child language development.

Though need for precise alignment of interlayer patterning in LTCC application, there have been few reports about zero-shrinkage sintering techniques. In this study, ceramic substrate with minimal x – y shrinkage was prepared by glass infiltration method with ‘Al 2 O 3 /glass/Al 2 O 3 ’ structure. Glass infiltration into alumina particle layer was observed with variation of both sintering temperature (700 ≤  T sint.  ≤ 900 °C) and alumina particle size distribution (0.5 ≤  D 50  ≤ 1.8 μm). Since glass had low viscosity enough to infiltrate at 700 °C, infiltration started at that temperature and infiltrated up to 20 μm or so with temperature increase, but infiltration depth did not increase noticeably above 750 °C. Based on these results, when sintered at 900 °C with controlled sheet thickness of both glass and alumina, the shrinkage in x – y direction was calculated as less than 0.2%, with 40% in z direction. Dielectric constant ( ɛ r ) measured 6.19 with quality factor ( Q ) of 552 at 1 GHz of frequency. From these results, it is thought that zero-shrinkage ceramic substrates would be obtained without de-lamination.

Though need for precise alignment of interlayer patterning in LTCC application, there have been few reports about zero-shrinkage sintering techniques. In this study, ceramic substrate with minimal x-y shrinkage was prepared by glass infiltration method with 'Al sub(2)O sub(3)/glass/A l sub(2)O sub(3)' structure. Glass infiltration into alumina particle layer was observed with variation of both sintering temperature (700 less than or equal to T sub(sint.) less than or equal to 900 degree C) and alumina particle size distribution (0.5 less than or equal to D sub(50) less than or equal to 1.8 mu m). Since glass had low viscosity enough to infiltrate at 700 degree C, infiltration started at that temperature and infiltrated up to 20 mu m or so with temperature increase, but infiltration depth did not increase noticeably above 750 degree C. Based on these results, when sintered at 900 degree C with controlled sheet thickness of both glass and alumina, the shrinkage in x-y direction was calculated as less than 0.2%, with 40% in z direction. Dielectric constant ( sub(r)) measured 6.19 with quality factor (Q) of 552 at 1 GHz of frequency. From these results, it is thought that zero-shrinkage ceramic substrates would be obtained without de-lamination.