Doctoral dissertation research: Interpretation and Processing of Overt Pronouns in Korean, English, and L2-acquisition

美国社会正变得更加多样化，部分原因是具有不同语言背景的人口的涌入；来自不同语言背景的人之间有时会发生语言误解，从而影响社会互动。产生语言误解的原因很多，第一语言对第二语言的跨语言影响就是其中之一。本论文旨在考察跨语言影响在代词解析领域中的作用。更具体地说，这个项目调查了说韩语的英语学习者如何解释英语代词和韩语代词。众所周知，韩语和英语代词具有不同的性质，但此前还没有对它们的差异进行实证调查。通过比较韩语和英语中的代词解释模式，该项目可以帮助了解将英语作为第二语言的韩语学习者因误解英语代词而产生的误解。该项目还有可能向教育工作者、语言教学专业人员和语言教学软件开发商提供有关学习者代词使用的信息。该项目考察了代词的语法知识和对代词的实时理解，重点关注母语为韩语的人如何处理其母语中的代词，以及韩语代词的特性如何影响以韩语为母语的英语学习者解释英语代词的方式。为了达到本研究的目的，本研究采用了六个不同的心理语言学方法进行实验。第一组实验使用两种不同的离线判断任务来测量学习者对韩语和英语代词的语法知识。第二组实验使用眼球监控方法来跟踪受试者在韩语和英语阅读过程中对代词解决的语法限制的时间进程。该项目将通过提供母语和非母语的语法知识和处理方面的信息，为理论语言学和心理语言学领域作出贡献。鉴于韩语是一种研究相对较少的语言，该项目进一步提高了韩语以及更广泛地说东亚语言的能见度

American society is becoming more diverse, in part due to the influx of populations with various linguistic backgrounds; linguistic misunderstanding among speakers from different linguistic backgrounds sometimes occurs, with consequences for social interaction. There are many possible sources of linguistic misunderstanding, one of which is the cross-linguistic influence of the first language on the learner's second language. This dissertation project aims to examine the role of cross-linguistic influence in the domain of pronoun resolution. More specifically, this project investigates how Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English pronouns as well as Korean pronouns. Korean and English pronouns are known to have different properties, yet there has been no prior empirical investigation of their differences. By comparing the patterns of pronoun interpretation in Korean and English, this project can provide insights into misunderstandings due to misinterpretation of English pronouns by Korean-speaking learners of English as a second language. This project also has the potential to inform educators, language teaching professionals and developers of language teaching software about learners' pronoun use.This project examines grammatical knowledge and real-time comprehension of pronouns, with a focus on how native speakers of Korean process pronouns in their native language, and how the properties of Korean pronouns influence the way that Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English pronouns. Six experiments with various psycholinguistic methods are conducted to achieve the goals of the study. The first set of experiments use two different offline judgment tasks to measure learners' grammatical knowledge of Korean and English pronouns. The second set of experiments use the eye-monitoring methodology to track the time course of participants' application of grammatical constraints on pronoun resolution during reading, in both Korean and English. This project will contribute to the fields of theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics by providing information on grammatical knowledge and processing in both native and non-native language. Given that Korean is a relatively understudied language, this project furthermore increases the visibility of Korean, and of East Asian languages more generally