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The Influence of Discourse Prominence on the Comprehension of Null-subject Sentences in Korean Adults

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2007, v.19 no.4, pp.383-400
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2007.19.4.008


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Abstract

The current research examined what type of discourse information Korean adults exploit when understanding sentences with null subjects. Adults read or heard short stories which consisted of 3 context sentences and one target sentence. The target sentence's subject was omitted. The target sentence either continued the subject of the preceding context or shifted subjects. The subject of the preceding context sentence was first or second mentioned within the sentence. The sentences of each stimulus story was presented one at a time either visually on a computer screen or auditorially over headphones, and subjects pressed a key as soon as they understood each sentence. The button-press reaction times was an index of comprehension difficulty. The results showed that Korean-speaking adults was quicker to understand null pronoun subject sentences when the subject was continued than when it was shifted from the prior context sentence. This pattern was found regardless of the position of the subject of the preceding context sentence. The first-mention advantage was found only in the self-paced reading task. The results are discussed in terms of language-universal and language-specific cues that enhance the discourse prominence of discourse entities.

keywords
Korean language processing, discourse comprehension, discourse prominence, ellipsis, null subject, 한국어 문장 처리, 담화 처리, 담화특출성, 생략주어

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The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology