The Acquisition of Syntactic Structures for Children from International Marriages: Focused on Negative Polarity Items

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the development of negative polarity items in English according to the age of children of international marriages and to examine the syntactic characteristics of English. This study on the acquisition of negative polarity items in English, which has been studied as a third language in a bilingual environment, is intended to reveal the effect of mother tongue and second language on syntactic processing. For this purpose, an empirical experiment was conducted to investigate the response rate of negative polarity items among multicultural middle school students residing in Korea. The experimental results are as follows. First, in terms of position, in all three groups, the response rate of negative polarity items was higher in the subject than in the object. It may have been acquired in their language environment. Second, with respect to age, the response rate of negative polarity items in subject position was highest in 1st grade, followed by 2nd grade, and lowest in 3rd grade. It can be seen that the higher the grade, the higher the awareness of negative polarity items. Although this study has limitations such as the number of samples and diversity of samples, it is meaningful in that it was attempted through practical experiments with English as a third language in a bilingual environment.