2018 Sat Session A 1000

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session A, East Balcony | 10am

The L1 Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Markers -ess (past-perfective) and -ko iss (progressive) in Korean
J. Ryu, Y. Shirai

It has been observed in cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of tense-aspect marking that children strongly associate past-perfective marking with telic verbs, general imperfective marking with atelic verbs, and progressive marking with activity verbs (the Aspect Hypothesis, Shirai & Andersen, 1995). To explain this observation, the Distributional Bias Hypothesis (Andersen, 1993; Shirai & Andersen, 1995) argued that children make particular associations based on input frequency. This study investigates the development of tense-aspect markers in Korean, -ess (past-perfective) and -ko iss (progressive), and examines the relation between child- directed speech and children’s speech.

Caretaker-child interaction of three Korean children (Jong 1;3-3;5, Joo 1;9-3;10, Yun 2;3-3;9) were video-recorded (every two weeks for 30 minutes) and transcribed, of which about 81hr were analyzed. As for past marker -ess, three children produced 1,491 tokens and their caretakers 12,556 tokens. As for progressive marker -ko iss, three children produced 163 tokens and their caretakers 2,092 tokens. In total, 16,302 tokens were analyzed.

The results indicate that in the early stages of development, the three Korean children used past marker -ess- predominantly with telic verbs, following the Aspect Hypothesis. All three caretakers also used past marking -ess- more frequently with telic verbs than with atelic verbs. All children’s usage closely reflects the frequency of their caretakers, yielding high correlation (r=0.94), suggesting that the input in the child-directed speech influenced the acquisition pattern of past marking consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. In contrast, the acquisition of progressive marker -ko iss did not follow the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis in that the children were not observed to associate progressive marking with activity verbs at the early stages of development. Further, caretaker’s input did not correlate with the children’s use of the imperfective marker, with much lower correlation than past tense (r =0.58).

To account for the results, we suggest that multiple factors need to be considered in the L1 acquisition of tense-aspect markers, such as input frequency, a language-specific system of aspectual semantics, and individual variation, rather than a strong universal hypothesis.

Regarding frequency To see the difference in input frequency between past tense -ess and progressive -ko iss, we calculated the percentage of each marker relative to the total number of caretaker’s utterances. Past tense (12.8%) is much more frequent, used nearly 10 times more than progressive marker (1.4%). High-frequency input may have a strong influence on children’s speech, and we argue that this may be the reason why past tense shows the higher correlation between caretakers’ and children’s use than progressive aspect does. Regarding the language- specific system of aspectual semantics, Korean progressive marker -ko iss is not obligatory to describe an ongoing event unlike English be -ing, and can describe a resultative state with transitive achievement verbs (Ryu & Shirai, 2014), which explains its lower frequency. Finally we note that because our participants clearly showed different patterns regarding the acquisition of progressive aspect, individual variation seems to be at work, as has been found for example by Budwig (1996) in pronominal case acquisition in English.