The Comprehension and Production of Tense Markings in 3- to 5-year Old Korean Children

3-5세 아동의 시제어미 이해와 산출의 정확성

In the present study, we investigated development of verb inflections or endings in 3- to 5-year old Korean-speaking children using 28 action verbs for both comprehension and production tasks. For each verb, a l0-second long motion picture and a sheet of paper with three random-ordered color pictures representing 'before, in the middle of, at the end of' the action were generated. A past tense inflection' -et ta,' two present progressive verb endings '-enta' & '-ko itta.' a future tense ending '-elyeko hanta' were tested. In the comprehension task, children were asked to point to a picture correctly representing the tense of a presented verb. In the production task, children were asked to produce a verb with correctly marking the tense of a presented picture. The order of the two tasks were counterbalanced across the children, and the motion pictures were only presented in the first task. Across the ages, the performance accuracies on both comprehension and production tasks were the highest for the past tense marking followed by two present progressive and future tense markings. For each verb endings, the changes of accuracies across ages were analyzed in both tasks. The types of errors for production tasks were also reported.