Korean EFL Learners' Acquisition of Telicity in Locatum Structures

The present study investigated Korean EFL learners' sensitivity to English telicity in two different kinds of structures, namely the simple telicity construction and the locatum telicity construction. Fifty-six Korean EFL learners and fifteen English native speakers participated in a naturalness rating task which was designed to find out whether the structure involving overt movement of the underlying object (locatum construction) works differently from the structure involving covert movement(simple construction) for the learners' recognition of L2 telicity. The results showed that although Korean learners generally failed to acquire native-like competence for telic-atelic distinction, they had less difficulty with the locatum construction than with the simple construction in recognizing English telicity. These results were interpreted as showing that Korean EFL learners' sensitivity to English telicity could vary according to the type of syntactic operation adopted to carry the aspectual information.