A Longitudinal Study on the Korean Past Tense Acquisition : Focused on the Interview of L1 Chinese Learners

Abstract

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in two Chinese learners of Korean. This paper has been designed to track developmental aspect of past tense form and to verify the Aspect Hypothesis through a longitudinal corpus. It was found that (1) two children use past tense form predominantly with [+telic] (accomplishment/ achievement verbs) than [-telic] (action/ state verbs); (2) in the stage 1 and stage 4, they use past tense form with accomplishment verbs the most; (3) in the stage 2 and stage 3, they use past tense form with achievement verbs the most. The result shows the pattern of the development of tense-aspect form is based on prototype formation (the correlations between verbs with [+telic] and past tense form `-ess-`) partially from non-past tense errors in the past tense obligatory contexts; the pattern in the early development of tense-aspect of Chinese acquisition of Korean have gaps with earlier studies.