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Second and heritage language acquisition of Korean case drop*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2016

EUN SEON CHUNG
EUN SEON CHUNG*
Affiliation:
University of Seoul
*
Address for correspondence: Eun Seon Chung, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoulsirip dae-ro 163, Bldg 4–223, Seoul, Koreaprolingesc@gmail.com
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Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate how early and late bilinguals attain implicit knowledge of Korean case drop that necessitates integration of multiple levels of information. An oral picture description task and a written forced-choice elicitation task were developed to investigate how different populations employ the relevant factors in Korean case drop and if certain types of cues are more accessible than others. The results reveal qualitative differences in the underlying linguistic knowledge of early vs. late bilinguals with early bilinguals achieving a higher level of mastery than late bilinguals in both oral and written tasks. The results underline the importance of age, context, and mode of acquisition and suggest that bilingual difficulty in the present phenomenon mainly arises from learners heavily relying on cues that are readily available to them in their respective context of acquisition and failing to effectively coordinate multiple constraints.

Keywords

heritage language acquisitionsecond language acquisitionKorean case droppragmatics/discourse
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 63 - 79
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916001218

*

I would like to thank the National Science Foundation for funding this project (NSF dissertation improvement grant: Award # BCS-1122163) and three anonymous Bilingualism: Language and Cognition reviewers for providing very insightful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Silvina Montrul and James Yoon for their invaluable feedback and guidance on this study. All remaining errors are my own.

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