Differences in Korean learners’ acquisition of causative expressions: focus on learners’ proficiency level

Abstract

This study examines the learning patterns of intermediate and advanced Korean learners in the acquisition of causative expressions according to their proficiency and the causative sentence type. We measured their grammatical knowledge using three types of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) and self-paced reading tasks (SPRTs) differing in time limit and modality. We included the GJT A' score and reading time (RT) for SPRTs’ target and spillover regions. The results showed that intermediate learners’ accuracy for morphological and lexical causatives was lower than that for syntactic causatives, while advanced learners’ accuracy for lexical causatives was lower than that for syntactic and morphological causatives. Learners showed a lower accuracy for timed written and aural GJTs than untimed GJT. In SPRT, learners took twice as long to process the target regions as native speakers and even longer to process spillover regions. Advanced learners had a longer RT. Learners had a low correct rate for causative suffix substitution and adjectival root questions, substitution questions on causative markers, and substitution questions on causee case postpositions in morphological, syntactic, and lexical causatives. Learners showed confusion with active sentences in lexical causatives. This study has implications for understanding causative expression acquisition for learners’ proficiency levels.