Abstract

This study attempts to re-examine whether explicit or implicit negative evidence plays a role in Korean language acquisition. Two data sets are used for analysis. One set consists of longitudinally collected production data from one Korean girl whose age ranges from 2;0 to 3;3. The other set is composed of transcribed conversations from 30 children whose age ranges from 2;0 to 4;11. Four types of syntactic errors that Lee (1992) has used are tabulated with slight modification; 1) the wrongly inserted the complimetizer 'ke'. 2) morphological errors in case-marking patterns. 3) morphological errors in inflectional elements of the verbs. 4) errors of word order in negative constructions. Maternal responses that have followed the children's sentences are asigned to one of the following 8 categories; 1) Exact Repetition 2) Contracted Repetition 3) Expanded Repetition 4) Corrective Recast 5) Confirmation Question 6) Topic Continuation 7) No Response 8) Explicit Response. Corrective Recast and Explicit Response are preceded only by the grammatical sentences, while 6 categories except these two are preceded either by the grammatical sentences or the ungrammatical sentences. The overall results are as follows; 1) The response rates for Explicit Response and Corrective Recast are extremely low, 2) Adults do not respond differentially to children's well-and ill-formed speech in their use of repetitions and confirmation questions. In conclusion, neither explicit negative evidence nor implicit negative evidence play any role in Korean language acquisition. Our data straightforwardly replicate the results from Lee (1992).