Morpho-syntactic processing of Korean case-marking and case drop

This study examines whether the mental representation of sentences contains a morphological representation of case marking, using a priming technique. Thirty-six native Korean speakers listened to and repeated spoken prime sentences and described visually presented target pictures. The prime sentences were manipulated for the presence of an accusative case-marker -lul/-ul. To investigate whether the previously reported animacy effects on case drop generalizes to a different task, animacy of the direct object was also manipulated. The results showed that there was a stronger bias to produce the accusative case-marker when the direct object was animate than when the direct object was inanimate, replicating the previously reported animacy effects on accusative case drop (Lee 2006a, 2006b; Chung 2013) in a syntactic priming task. Furthermore, case marking on inanimate direct objects was influenced by whether or not the accusative case marker was produced earlier in the prime, providing evidence for the presence of an abstract representation of case marking.