• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.21-31
• /
• 2003

This paper reports our experimental study with Korean-Chinese (=KC) bilinguals as compared with Korean monolinguals. We aim to find KC bilingual speakers' sentence processing strategies, and the interaction between the Ll and U2 grammars in bilingual development. To this end, we recruited 166 subjects of all age groups from age 3 to adult in the Korean autonomous community in Yanji, China, and did a classical subject/actor identification test, where subjects are supposed to pick out the subjects/actor of both sensical and nonsensical sentences (cf. Liu, Bates & Li, 1992). We compared our results with our previous work on monolingual Koreans, and found out that KC bilinguals rely on word order as well as anumacy; that KC bilinguals make use of morphology at age 10 as compared with age 5 for monolinguals; and that KC bilingual adults rely on animacy and word order as well as morphology, while monolingual Korean adults rely solely on morphology for sentence interpretation. Given that animacy and word order play an important role in the Chinese grammar, our finding lends support to the backward transfer which Liu, Bates & Li (1992) propose for early bilingualism.