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Korean Children and Adults Use a Locative Case Marker to Infer the Meaning of Novel Spatial Nouns

  • THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
  • 2010, 23(4), pp.17-31
  • Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
  • Research Area : Social Science > Psychological Science

Yoon-ha Lee 1 Hyun Joo SONG 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The current research examined whether Korean adults and children use a locative case marker to learn the meaning of novel nouns. During familiarization, participants watched the videos of spatial relations between 2 objects(ex: a teddy bear in a basket) and heard sentences including a novel noun following a locative case marker ‘ey’(ex: wubby-ey issta). During test, participants saw either a scene about a novel spatial relation between the same objects(object match: the teddy bear in front of the basket) or a scene about the same spatial relation between new objects(location match: a puppy in a bag). They were asked to choose an event including the referent of the novel noun. In Experiment 1, adults chose the location match, suggesting that they interpreted the novel nouns followed by ‘ey’ as locative terms. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds but not 3-year-olds, showed the same pattern as the adults in Experiment 1. These results add to the evidence on the development of ability to use morphological cues when learning the meaning of spatial terms.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.