중국 조선족 아동의 한국어, 중국어 관계절 발달

Subject/object Asymmetry in Chosunjok Children’s Development of Relative Clauses in Korean and in Chinese

This paper investigates subject/object asymmetry in Chosunjok children’s development of relative clauses in Korean and in Chinese compared with Korean and Chinese monolingual children. An experiment of a picture-aided comprehension task was conducted with 100 hundred Chosunjok children in Shenyang, China, 33 Korean children in Ansan, Korea, and 35 Chinese children in Shenyang, China. The results showed that (i) subject relative clauses was acquired earlier than object relative clauses not only by the bilingual children but also by the monolingual children in both languages. On the other hand, it was also found that (ii) the bilingual children’s development of relative clauses was about one and a half year behind than the monolingual children’s. The findings of this study provide supporting evidence for the following previous hypotheses regarding bilingualism and acquisition of relative clauses. First, they support the accessibility hierarchy of relativization (Keenan & Comrie 1977) and structural distance hypothesis (e.g., O’Grady et al. 2003) to account for the hierarchy, and Canonical sentence strategy (e.g., Slobin & Bever 1982) to explain the errors. Second, our results also conform to such previous findings on bilingualism that bilingual children’s language development is similar to monolingual children’s in its pattern but different in its time frame; the former is slower than the latter (e.g. Gathercole, in press).