Shin GH. Good-enough processing, home language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task effects for Korean heritage speakers' sentence comprehension.
Front Psychol 2024;
15:1382668. [PMID:
39149703 PMCID:
PMC11324561 DOI:
10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1382668]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2024] [Accepted: 06/10/2024] [Indexed: 08/17/2024] Open
Abstract
The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct good-enough processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills (inhibitory control; working memory), and task types (acceptability judgement; self-paced reading). For this purpose, we employ two word-order patterns (verb-final vs. verb-initial) of two clausal constructions in Korean-suffixal passive and morphological causative-which contrast pertaining to the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and the interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as monolingual Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker's ability and willingness to conduct both parsing routes, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues. Implications of this study are expected to advance our understanding of a learner's mind for underrepresented languages and populations in the field.
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