Testing the Advanced Korean EFL Learners' Acquisition of the Unaccusative Verb in Online Processing

The present study investigated advanced Korean-speaking L2 learners' acquisition of English unaccusative verbs in comparison with unergatives and transitives from a processing point of view. Despite the fact that L2 acquisition should be seen as a manifestation of the learners' implicit knowledge, little empirical study has investigated the direct link between learners' performance and their mental representations in the acquisition of the unaccusative constructions. In an attempt to explore learners' implicit knowledge of unaccusatives, this study adopted a self-paced reading experiment, which recorded 30 Korean college students' reading times on unaccusatives, unergatives and transitives in a passivized form. The results showed that reading times increased significantly with passivized unaccusatives and unergatives as compared to passivized transitives. The findings suggest that, in addition to their target-like performance on a grammaticality judgment task, the advanced L2 learners have acquired implicit knowledge of unaccusatives.