Lack of early sensitivity and gradual emergence of native phoneme categories: A pattern from underrepresented language learners.

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and languages.

Development of fricative sound perception in Korean infants: The role of language experience and infants' initial sensitivity.

In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants' perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language's distinct categorization of sounds. Unlike many fricative contrasts utilized in most of the world's languages, Korean fricatives (/s*/-/s/) are all voiceless.

Why loose rings can be tight: the role of learned object knowledge in the development of Korean spatial fit terms.

The Korean fit distinction has been at the center of a debate about whether language can influence spatial concepts. Most research on this issue has largely assumed that the concepts that support Korean fit terms are signaled by innate abstract visual cues (e.g.

Children's (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: evidence for developing control in sentence processing.

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; however, in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure, whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence.

Evidentiality in language and cognition.

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g.

Young children's use of prosody in sentence parsing.

Korean children's ability to use prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was studied using two types of ambiguity. First, we examined a word-segmentation ambiguity in which placement of the phrasal boundary leads to different interpretations of a sentence. Next, we examined a syntactic ambiguity in which the same words were differently grouped into syntactic phrases by prosodic demarcation.