Acquiring Korean wh-in-situ Constructions by Native English Speakers

Abstract

This study investigated the L2 grammars of native English speakers acquiring two possible interpretations of Korean wh-in-situ expressions, question vs. indefinite readings, to explore whether adult learners can reconfigure grammatical features from the way they are lexicalized in their L1. The results of translation and judgment tasks indicated that both intermediate and advanced L2 learners showed statistically better performance on the question reading than on the indefinite reading in morphological licensing environments. A theoretical approach that models the acquisition problem in terms of the reassembly of features in lexical items is invoked to best account for the data.