A Psycholinguistic Approach to the Study of Focus Particles in L1 Acquisition

Abstract

In contrast to the active discussion on adults’ incremental processing of sentences with focus operators only or even, there has been little research on children’s on-line comprehension of sentences containing them. From psycholinguistic perspectives, the comprehension of a sentence with Korean focus operator -man ‘only’ is a process of determining what is in focus and the costly computation of a contrast set with regard to the focused constituent. The current study attempts to investigate whether Korean-speaking children(aged from 5 to 6) are able to compute a contrast set, using a DIY(do it yourself) eye-tracking paradigm(Shin, 2007). The result can provide the on-line evidence of their processing activity required for the correct interpretation of -man. Truth Value Judgment Task combined with DIY eye-tracking paradigm(Crain and Thornton, 1998; Shin, 2007) was conducted using target sentences with -man attached to subject constituents or -man to object constituents are analyzed along with eye movements and fixations. There was a high proportion of eye fixations on subject-contrast sets for subject-focused sentences and object contrast sets for object-focused sentences. It indicates that children are adult-like in inferring the contrast information, which contributes to charting children’s processing mechanism of Korean focus particle -man.