Acquisition of Grammatical Functions of the Korean Language by Korean-Chinese Children : A Short-Term Longitudinal Study

중국 조선족 아동들의 한국어 문법 기능 습득

This study examined the spontaneous utterances of 20 1-2 year old Korean-Chinese children in Yanji, China by videotaping their spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her caregiver for 30 minutes on 4 separate occasions. Utterances were transcribed and coded by nominative and accusative case markers; then analyzed by grammatical functions. Results showed that the order and pattern of the acquisition of the case marking system of Korean-Chinese bilinguals differed from that of Korean monolinguals. Bilinguals used the accusative marker -lul earlier than the nominative marker-ka and overextended the accusative marker more often than the nominative marker. These results are consistent with those of Gathercole (in press) who found that bilingual children differed from monolinguals in mastering grammar.