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Effects of Long-Term Language Use Experience in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Korean

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Abstract

Attraction effects arise when a comprehender erroneously retrieves a distractor instead of a target item during memory retrieval operations. In Korean, considerable processing difficulties occur in the agreement relation checking between a subject and an honorific-marked predicate when an intervening distractor carries a non-honorific feature. We investigate how attraction effects are managed during the processing of Korean subject-predicate honorific agreement by two Korean-speaking groups with different language use experience backgrounds: college students and airline workers. Results showed that both groups demonstrated stable knowledge of the honorific agreement in the acceptability judgment task. In the self-paced reading task, the airline group, who used honorifics extensively in their workplace, was less affected by the attraction effect than the student group. Our findings suggest that long-term language use experience can modulate how language users manage potential influence from attraction effects in real-time sentence processing.

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Notes

  1. There is a debate as to whether subject honorification is a type of syntactic agreement. While some researchers emphasize the pragmatic function of subject honorification (e.g., Brown, 2015; Choe, 2004; Kim & Sells, 2007), others view subject honorification as a type of grammatical agreement (e.g., Choi, 2010; Kwon & Sturt, 2016, 2019). Throughout this paper, we maintain a neutral stance toward these proposals and focus on processing aspects of the honorific agreement. .

  2. The abbreviations for the glosses throughout this paper are as follows: ACC = accusative case marker; COMP = complementizer; DECL = declarative marker; DIR = directional marker; GEN = genitive case marker; HON = honorific suffix; NOM = nominative case marker; PAST = past tense marker.

  3. As a reviewer pointed out, the honorific agreement between an inanimate subject and a predicate receives different degrees of grammaticality depending on the semantic unity between the subject and its possessor (Ko and Ku 2018). Honorifcation can apply to inanimate nouns that are inherently subordinate to the possessor, such as body parts and characteristics. For example, the acceptability of the sentence (5b) may increase if the subject moca (‘hat’) is replaced by swuyem (‘beard’), which bears a close bond with the possessor halapeci (‘grandfather’). In contrast, the subject moca (‘hat’) hardly constitutes an inseparable relationship with the possessor, rendering its honorification less felicitous, as evident in the participants’ lower acceptance rates in this condition compared to those in the match condition in the acceptability judgment task.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    Hyunwoo Kim

  2. Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Křížkovského 512/10, 771 80, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Gyu-Ho Shin

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  1. Hyunwoo Kim
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Hyunwoo Kim and Gyu-Ho Shin. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Hyunwoo Kim and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Gyu-Ho Shin.

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All authors certify that they have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript. The authors also certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest, or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

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This study was approved by the University of Hawaii Institutional Review Board (IRB) under the reference number 2016-30730 (social & behavioral; exempt). The full names of the Board members were not disclosed publicly. This study is in full compliance with the ethics provisions of the IRB approval.

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Kim, H., Shin, GH. Effects of Long-Term Language Use Experience in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Korean. J Psycholinguist Res 50, 523–541 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-09737-0

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