Doctoral Dissertation Research in Linguistics: Young children's use of prosody in disambiguating sentences: the case of Korean children

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Under the direction of Dr. Reiko Mazuka, Ms. Youngon Choi will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research on language development will involve 5-10 year-old Korean children. Previous research suggests that, unlike adults, young children do not use prosodic information to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences (such as "Tap the frog with the flower"). Ms. Choi asks whether children can use prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguity when the cognitive demands of the task are not too great. Children will be asked to listen to a sentence and judge whether it matches with a picture. In the first study, prosodic cues will be presented along with other cues (such as morphological cues) to test whether children are better able to use prosodic cues when they are combined with other cues. In the second study, ambiguous noun phrases (rather than full sentences) will be used to test if syntactically less complex structures allow children to use prosodic cues more easily. This research is significant to the fields of language acquisition and language comprehension. In particular, since little is known about the interaction between prosody and syntax in young children's sentence processing, this research will contribute to our understanding of how children develop language processing strategies. As most of the existing research has emphasized English, the use of Korean will also provide an important contrast for future studies.