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Animacy Effect and Language Specificity: Judgment of Unaccusative Verbs by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Language

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Abstract

This study investigated the tendency of overpassivization of unaccusative verbs by Korean learners of English as a foreign language (FL). Sixty Korean native college students participated in the study, along with 17 English-speaking counterparts serving as a comparison group. Consistent with the findings of previous research, this study found Korean students’ tendency to incorrectly accept passive-voice with inanimate subjects. The results of this study highlighted the role of lexical animacy, the hierarchy of agentivity, and language-specific effects on FL judgment. The findings of this study suggest a robust language-specific L1 effect on L2 acquisition and a greater involvement of cognition in FL use than language input.

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Notes

  1. In spite of differences in learning English as L2 and FL, previous research (Balcom 1997; Oshita 1997; Oshita 2001; Sorace 2000; Yip 1995) shows a consistent pattern of overpassivization errors across learners of English as L2 and FL. Given this common linguistic phenomenon regardless of L2 and FL, the term L2 in this paper inclusively refers to both L2 and FL for the sake of simplicity.

  2. In Korean, subjects are often omitted. This is a linguistic peculiarity of Korean as a context-bound language. At times, objects are omitted in sentences, too. However, the listener have no difficulties understanding the utterances in Korean.

  3. A DMDX syntax including a set of stimuli used in this study is available from the first author upon request.

  4. The experimental program was designed by Kenneth Foster and Jonathan Foster at the University of Arizona. The free software can be downloaded from http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kforster/dmdx/download.htm.

  5. For example, the measure distance between the scores of 85 % correct (natural log = 1.73) and 95 % correct (natural log = 2.94) is 2.52 times greater than the distance between the scores of 25 % correct (\(\text{ natural } \text{ log }= -1.10\)) and 35 % correct (\(\text{ natural } \text{ log }= -0.62\)), resulting in natural log 1.21 and natural log 0.48, respectively, for the difference.

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Acknowledgments

We appreciate the comments and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers. The researchers carefully adhered to all the ethical guidelines as required for conducting human research when data collection took place in Korea.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Hye K. Pae & Brian Schanding

  2. Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea

    Yeon-Jin Kwon

  3. Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Yong-Won Lee

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  1. Hye K. Pae
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  2. Brian Schanding
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  3. Yeon-Jin Kwon
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  4. Yong-Won Lee
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Correspondence to Hye K. Pae.

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Pae, H.K., Schanding, B., Kwon, YJ. et al. Animacy Effect and Language Specificity: Judgment of Unaccusative Verbs by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Language. J Psycholinguist Res 43, 187–207 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9246-6

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