Factors for Parsing Relative Clauses by EFL Korean Adult Speakers

This study explores how EFL Korean adult speakers parse syntactic structures such as the relative clause attachment following a complex of Determiner Phrases (DPs). Previous studies (Ha, 2005; Han, 2012; Kim, 2010) have displayed that EFL Korean speakers prefer high attachment (HA) in parsing relative clauses (RCs) which are explained through the Tuning Hypothesis (Mitchell & Cuetos, 1991; Cuetos, Mitchell & Corley, 1996; Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996; Mitchell, Brysbaert, Grondelaers & Swanepoel, 2000). This study conducted an experiment in which 130 EFL Korean adult speakers were examined with three types of judgement tasks. The results of the study convincingly demonstrated that, although EFL Korean adult speakers showed preferences and that the Tuning Hypothesis works, the results are different from the previous studies (Ha, 2005; Han, 2012; Kim, 2010). The participants differently parsed the target structure in the tuning direction. These results are attributed to gender and English proficiency rather than L1 transfer as found in the previous studies. In other words, it showed that the tendency of RC attachment by EFL Korean adult speakers has relevance to English proficiency and the gender of the participants. In addition, the result of parsing RC attachment can not always be that EFL Korean adult speakers prefer HA to LA and can be justified by the perspective of the tuning directionality.