Early development of verb structures and caregiver input in Korean: Two case studies

This study examines the development of verb structures in the multiword combinations of two Korean learners, starting from 15 months of age when both children produced their first word combination. After a brief period of "verb island usage," from 20 months the two children showed remarkable systematicity and coherence in their use of transitive and intransitive verbs: Transitive verbs typically occurred with objects whereas intransitive verbs occurred with subjects. These distinct "preferred" structures between the two verb categories corresponded to distinct semantic and discourse pragmatic structures. Transitive sentences encoded the child or the mother as the agent acting upon inanimate entities, whereas intransitive sentences encoded a third party as the agent or experience of an event or state. Analysis of the mothers' speech to the children suggests that not only do they provide children with a clear model for the preferred structures but they also guide children's development by eliciting those structures from them through questions. The study suggests that the early development of verb structures in Korean is due in part to these features of the input as well as to children's early sensitivity to syntactic and semantic/pragmatic patterns in the target grammar.