제2언어 한국어 정보구조 습득 연구

L2 acquisition of Korean Information Structure: Focusing on the Production and Online Processing of Korean Dative construction

This study examined second language (L2) learners’ sensitivity to information structure in Korean sentence production and online processing. We conducted sentence completion and self-paced reading tasks with 32 Korean speakers and 25 highly proficient Japanese-speaking learners of Korean. In the sentence production task, where participants read a context sentence and provided written continuations for sentence fragments containing a subject and a dative verb, the Korean speakers produced the preverbal complements according to information structure, whereas the L2 learners showed a strong predilection for canonical over noncanonical word order, regardless of information structure. In the self-paced reading task, where participants read Korean dative constructions whose word order was either consistent or inconsistent with information structure, only the Korean speakers, but not the L2 learners, slowed down when the word order was incongruent with information structure. These results suggest that the use of information structure cues during the production and processing of Korean dative sentences remains a considerable challenge for L2 learners.