성별과 연령이 영어 부정극어 습득에 미치는 영향: 다문화 한국 중등학생 대상으로

The Effects of Gender and Age on the Acquisition of English Negative Polarity Items: For Korean Secondary School Students from Multicultural Families

This study investigated the acquisition of negative polarity Items(NPIs) by gender. The participants were Korean middle school students from multicultural families, and the survey was conducted mainly on English simple sentences. First, the results on NPIs showed that male and female students had a higher frequency of NPIs in the object position than in the subject position. This suggests that 60 Korean secondary school students from multicultural families have a high level of awareness of NPIs regardless of gender. Second, the frequency of NPIs in the subject and object positions was significantly lower in the third grade which is the highest grade. This implies that age had an effect on the acquisition of NPIs. To sum up, firstly, it was confirmed that there was a difference between female and male students in the frequency of NPIs. Secondly, there was a difference in the frequency of NPIs by age. Thirdly, there was a difference in the utterance rate of NPIs in the subject and object positions.When comparing the utterance rates of Korean middle school students from multicultural families and Korean middle school students in the utterance rate of NPIs uttered by gender, the common point was that first of all, the utterance rate of NPIs was lower in the subject position than in the object position. This suggests that regardless of nationality, they are aware of the use of NPIs to some extent through learning or innately, and it may be the result of repeated learning as they get older. These results also mean that we can expect some effect through repeated learning in educational settings. Next, the utterance rate of NPIs was lower in the higher grades. Cases where conditions are insufficient will be dealt with in follow-up studies.