Acquisition of the Scope Interaction between Numeral Quantifiers and Negation in Korean: A Descriptive Study on Production and Comprehension

Date
2006-03-01
Authors
Kwak, Hye-Young
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics
Volume
2006
Number/Issue
Starting Page
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
This study explores the scope interaction between numeral quantifiers and negation in Korean. Several studies have investigated children’s interpretation of sentences containing numeral quantifiers and negation in languages other than Korean (Lidz and Musolino 2002, Su 2003, among others). In an attempt to fill a gap in the literature, this study investigates Korean-speaking children’s production and comprehension of sentences containing numeral quantifiers and negation. Twenty-nine Korean-speaking children aged four to five and a control group of twenty-six native Korean speakers participated in the production experiment, which involved an elicited production task (Crain and Thornton 1998, McDaniel, McKee, and Cairns 1998). The results revealed that the children and the control group produced few negative sentences containing numerals, preferring instead to use the corresponding affirmative sentences. The same subjects along with additional fourteen adult controls participated in the comprehension experiment, which involved a Truth-Value Judgment Task (Crain and Thornton 1998). The results showed that both the children and the control group tended to give judgments that were consistent with the quantifier wide scope interpretation of the test sentence. However, the control group did select the negation wide scope interpretation more frequently than the children. I discuss several factors that might have contributed to these results, including pragmatic factors, processing, and distributional patterns of numeral quantifiers and negation in the input.
Description
Keywords
linguistics
Citation
Kwak, Hye-Young. 2006. Acquisition of the Scope Interaction between Numeral Quantifiers and Negation in Korean: A Descriptive Study on Production and Comprehension. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Working Papers in Linguistics 37(3).
Extent
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Table of Contents
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.