The L1 Acquisition of the Imperfective Aspect markers in Korean: a Comparison with Japanese

The L1 Acquisition of the Imperfective Aspect markers in Korean: a Comparison with Japanese Ju-Yeon Ryu Department of Cross-cultural Education, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576 Japan juyeonryu@gmail.com Abstract. This study investigates the L1 acquisition of the Korean imperfective aspect markers -ko iss- and -a iss-, and attempts to identify language-general and language- specific acquisition patterns through comparison with Japanese. In cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of tense-aspect marking, children have been observed to associate progressive marking with activity verbs in early stages of development. This study aims to test whether or not Korean children will actually follow the acquisition pattern and acquire progressive marking with activity verbs earlier than resultative marking with achievement verbs. Longitudinal interaction data from three Korean boys was collected and analyzed. The results indicate that there was no common pattern in the three children‟s acquisition, which differences from the results of similar tests with Japanese children. This suggests that neither universal predisposition nor the distribution bias hypothesis can explain the L1 acquisition of Korean aspect markers, and that individual variation plays a much larger role. Keywords: First language acquisition, Korean imperfective aspect markers, the Aspect Hypothesis, the distribution bias hypothesis, individual variation 1. Introduction The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology has shown an interesting universal pattern in both first and second language acquisition (Andersen and Shirai, 1996). This universal tendency is referred to as the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994; Robison, 1995), which claims that there is a universal developmental sequence of tense-aspect markers: past tense forms start with achievement verbs, and progressive forms start with activity verbs. Correlations between tense-aspect markers and the inherent aspect of verbs have been verified in the first language acquisition of various languages (for example, Bloom et al.1980 in English, Antinucci and Miller 1976 in Italian, Bronckart and Sinclair 1973 in French, Weist et al. 1984 in Polish, Stephany 1981 in Greek, Aksu-koc 1988 in Turkish). However, only a few studies were conducted on the L1 acquisition of Asian languages, such as Shirai (1993, 1998) and Shirai and Suzuki (in print) for Japanese, and Seda and Lee (2002) for Korean. In their study on the L1 acquisition of Korean, Seda and Lee (2002) found that both Korean and Turkish children use past marking predominantly with accomplishment and achievement verbs first, supporting the Aspect Hypothesis. However, they only focused on the acquisition of past tense . Further research is needed to verify the Aspect Hypothesis completely, including the acquisition of the progressive tense. This study tests whether the universal developmental pattern proposed by Andersen and  The work reported in this paper was supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows and the Tohoku University International Advanced Research and Education Organization. Copyright 2011 by Ju-yeon Ryu 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 186–195 186 Shirai (1996) holds true for the L1 acquisition of Korean, and also compares it to the L1 acquisition of the Japanese imperfective marker -te i- in order to discover what determines children‟s acquisition …

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