A small but growing body of research on sentence processing during the comprehension of Korean sentences has begun to contribute important evidence about general principles in sentence processing and aspects of sentence processing that distinguish Korean from the languages that historically have been the primary focus of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Y. Kim, 1999; Lee, Lee & Gordon, 2007). This research complements studies of Korean using more traditional linguistic methods (e.g. I. Lee & Ramsey, 2000; Kang, 2001) as well as complementing the larger body of psycholinguistic research on Korean which has focused on word-level processes (e.g. Simpson & Kang, 1994; 2004, Nam, Kim, Moon & Seo, 1998).

Research on Korean has contributed to the understanding of sentence processing in three important ways: 1) examining whether principles of sentence processing established using other languages can be extended to Korean in a valid way, 2) examining the processing of types of ambiguity or complexity that are present in Korean but not in previously studied languages, and 3) examining the mechanisms of sentence processing by taking advantage of dissociations between different types of information that are more clearly present in Korean than in previously studied languages. Below, we briefly discuss research in each of these types that we have contributed to before providing a more extensive discussion of how recent research on the processing of Korean sentences provides insight into the nature of the memory processes underlying complex sentences and the manner in which sentence processing is guided by informational structure.