영어문장 해석에 있어서 한국인 영어 학습자들의 어휘 - 의미단서와 문법단서의 이용에 관한 연구 : 경쟁모형을 중심으로

A Study on Grammatical and Lexico - Sementic Cue in English Sentence Interpretation by Korean Students : Based on the Competition Model

This study investigates the strength of grammatical cue and lexico-semantic cue in English sentence interpretation of Korean learners of English. Subjects were required to identify the sentence subjects after reading English and Korean sentences, each consisted of one verb and two nouns. In each sentence, lexico-semantic cue(noun-animacy/inanimacy), syntactic cue(word order) and morphological/morpho-syntactic cue(subject-verb agreement/ case-marking) were either competed or consistent with one another. The results are as follows: Korean learners heavily relied on lexico-semantic cue in the interpretation of English sentences, while English native speakers primarily used grammatical cue according to recent surveys. There was evidence of indirect transfer in using cues. Most Korean learners used only one kind of cue in selecting subject in both English and Korean sentences. They used lexico-semantic cue in processing English sentences, whereas English native speakers used all kinds of cues in English. This observation seems to be compatible with the competition model, which aims to account for the acquisition of language in terms of cue strength. Since English has various cues to mark the subject function, Korean learners may have some trouble to treat various cues at a time.