The Role of Transfer in the Acquisition of Korean Locative Verbs by English and Japanese Speakers

Abstract

This paper addresses the role of L1 transfer by examining the acquisition of Korean locative constructions by native speakers of English and Japanese, using a grammaticality judgment task. The acquisition of Korean locative verbs by these two language groups is particularly well-suited for investigating the role of L1 transfer since grammatical properties of locative verbs in Japanese and English are distinct. Locative verbs in Korean have properties essentially identical to the ones in Japanese. Of particular interest in the present study is the acquisition of fill- and pile-class locative verbs, where syntactic properties of Japanese and English diverge. An L1 transfer-based hypothesis predicts that with respect to the two classes, the two language groups would show distinct developmental paths. It was found that the prediction was partially borne out. For this unexpected result, we advance a developmental effect-based account. Additionally, we provide the results of a corpus-based study on Korean locative verbs and interpret the acquisition data in view of the findings of the corpus study.