On-line Processing of Aspectual Coercion by Korean Learners of English

Abstract

Cho, Jeonghwa. 2017. On-line Processing of Aspectual Coercion by Korean Learners of English. It has been argued that the combination of semelfactive verbs and durational modifiers such as in the baby hiccupped for an hour causes an aspectual mismatch and therefore an additional processing time is necessary to reanalyze the event as an iterative one (Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2008; Piñango et al., 1999, 2006; Todorova et al., 2000). This process of reinterpretation is called an aspectual coercion. Experiment 1 attempted to investigate how aspectually coerced sentences are processed in Korean with online and offline measures. Twenty five Korean participants did not show any processing difficulties in the self-paced reading task but gave lower acceptability ratings for the coerced conditions in the acceptability judgment task. Experiment 2 investigated the same structure in English with Korean learners of English and English native speakers. The same trend as in the Korean experiments was observed in both groups. This study proposes that readers do not fully engage in semantic components in online processing of aspectual coercion in both Korean and English.