One Is Not Enough: Interactive Role of Word Order, Case-marking, and Verbal Morphology in Children’s Comprehension of Suffixal Passive in Korean

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors (word order, case-marking, and verbal morphology) in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where these factors are obscured systematically by employing acoustic masking – chewing and coughing. Results from three picture selection tasks show that (i) the Agent-First preference is not ubiquitously employed by young children, but is dependent on other grammatical cues, (ii) despite mediocre accuracy rates on passive sentences, we nonetheless find evidence that children have some knowledge about the passive construction, and (iii) scrambling of passive sentences does not aid in comprehension. These findings suggest that, in order to understand the acquisition of the passive, all these structural factors need to be considered.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ -ey is also used to denote an agent in passives, but only inanimate agents (Sohn, 1999). We limit the scope of our discussion to animate agents, so we focus on -eykey/hanthey hereafter.

² Abbreviation: ACC = accusative case marker; CASE = case, unspecified; DAT = dative marker; NOM = nominative case marker; PSV = passive suffix; PST = past tense marker; SE = sentence ender.

³ https://childes.talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=EastAsian/Korean/.

⁴ We assume that all the four allomorphs of the passive suffix behave identically and so not distinguish between them. They are phonologically and lexically conditioned (Sohn, 1999; Yeon, 2015), bringing in no change in their syntax. We thus did not control for which allomorphs occurred in our experiments and how many times they appeared in the stimuli throughout the experiments. We acknowledge that there may be differences in the age at which different allomorphs are acquired, which awaits future investigation.

⁵ These were all the children available in that preschool at the moment of conducting the experiment.

⁶ We relied on the diagnosis of the child participants’ language problem/impairments by way of records of standard tests conducted by the preschool.

⁷ All the pictures in Experiments 1 to 3, all of which were coloured, were produced by a professional cartoon artist. They were designed to express actions in a clear and dynamic manner, but they were not animated. This might have added difficulty in figuring out what the actions were about, as one reviewer pointed out. It may be worth investigating whether presenting the same actions in this study through animated motions modulates children’s performance, which awaits further study.:

⁸ In Experiment 1 (and Experiment 3 as well), the active fillers were not a focus of the current study, but we provided basic descriptions and statistical analysis of children’s performance on these items whenever needed.

⁹ We asked them to verbally describe each picture in one sentence considering the designated test sentence, and found that most of the descriptions fell into a transitive event (N-NOM N-ACC V or N-ACC N-NOM V; mean = 94%, SD = 0.24) with the intended verbs (mean = 92%, SD = 0.27).

¹⁰ Similar to what we did in Experiment 2, they were asked to verbally describe each picture in one sentence considering the designated test sentence. We found that almost every description was about a transitive event (mean = 96%, SD = 0.20), all of which were expressed as an active voice, with the intended verbs (mean = 93%, SD = 0.26).

¹¹ As one reviewer suggested, a better way to evaluate the role of case-marking for children’s comprehension of the passive is to compare the performance on the passive stimuli in Experiment 1 directly to that on case-less sentences with verbs (and passive morphology) present (i.e., N_CASEN_CASEV_psv). Unfortunately, we did not include this pattern in our experiments, which may weaken our claim on the role of case-marking in children’s comprehension of the passives (but see 2020). However, we believe that comparisons of children’s performance in the canonical/scrambled passives between Experiments 1 and 3 can address how case-marking works in conjunction with the other grammatical cues posed in this study (word order and verbal morphology).

¹² Indeed, a growing body of literature is revealing that children may well have the ability to comprehend the relevant components to the passive pattern, but have difficulty in real-time deployment of their knowledge. When those difficulties are eased, children seem to show impressive knowledge of the passive pattern. See Messenger et al. (2012) for evidence from priming, and Deen et al., 2018 for evidence from an experiment that showed that, when a passive sentence is repeated, children show significant improvement in their comprehension of the sentence. This latter point shows that children’s poor comprehension of passive sentence is not one of knowledge, but one of deployment.

¹³ Animacy may also be a cue, although indirect, in that an inanimate subject may be a cue that the agent role might be assigned elsewhere.