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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 8:2 (2018) ► pp.252–282

Case in Heritage Korean

| Gyeongin National University of Education, Korea
| University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
| University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

In a series of five experiments with 31 Korean heritage children, we show that knowledge of case and the ability to use it must be evaluated with careful attention to multiple factors that can influence access to morphological information in the course of comprehension and production. The first two experiments, which compared the canonical SOV pattern with the non-canonical OSV pattern, employed picture-selection comprehension tasks to assess knowledge of case. Poor performance on OSV sentences was mitigated by experimental manipulations that either enhanced the perceptual salience of case or provided felicitous conditions for the use of non-canonical word order. The next three experiments, all involving production tasks, revealed that many children who failed to demonstrate knowledge of case in the comprehension tasks actually produced nominative and accusative case correctly, thereby revealing their knowledge of this morphosyntactic system.

Keywords: heritage Korean, case, comprehension, production
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The comprehension of case
    • 2.1Study 1: Sensitivity to the nominative and the accusative
      • Participants
      • Procedure and materials
      • Results
      • Discussion
    • 2.2Study 2: Sensitivity to the dative case
      • Participants
      • Procedure and materials
      • Results
      • Discussion
    • 2.3General discussion
  • 3.The production of case
    • 3.1Study 3: Case on NPs with contrastive focus
      • Participants
      • Procedure and materials
      • Results and discussion
    • 3.2Study 4: Case in narratives
      • Participants
      • Procedure and materials
      • Results
      • Discussion
    • 3.3Study 5: The production of the topic marker
      • Participants
      • Procedure and materials
      • Results and discussion
      • Discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 January 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16001.kim
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Erratum

1 Feb 2017: Due to an error in production, the version published online on 13 Jan 2017 did not include all the corrections from the proofreading stage. These corrections have now been implemented in the version that is currently online.