아동의 언어습득 차이: 부정극어를 중심으로

The Differences of Language Acquisition in Children: Based on Negative Polarity Items

This paper examines differences of the participants’ Negative Polarity Item(NPI) responses and discovers the reason for the differences. Sixty children aged four to six took part in the experiment for this study. In the result, the participants produced more NPIs in object position than in subject position. The K5 group produced fewer NPIs among the three groups during the experiment. Unlike English any -type NPIs, other NPIs such as hanato and amwusalam-to can be used instead of Korean NPIs amwuto . Compared to the study done by Kim (2016), the Korean children produced much more NPIs both in subject and object positions. Another finding here is that the difference is not statistically significant both in subject and object positions unlike Kim’s study. In summary, the responses manifested no subject/object asymmetry for NPIs in Korean.