Effects of Long-Term Language Use Experience in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Korean

• Published in: Journal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 523 - 541
• Main Authors: Kim, Hyunwoo, Shin, Gyu-Ho
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2021; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Acceptability; Air Transportation; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive ability; Cognitive Psychology; College Students; Comprehension; Cues; Decision Making; Employees; Grammar; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical subject; Honorifics; Indo European Languages; Judgment; Korean; Korean language; Language; Language Processing; Language Role; Language Usage; Linguistic Input; Linguistics; Memory; Native Language; Periodicals; Predicate; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Reading; Second language learning; Sentences; Short Term Memory; Syntactic processing; Task Analysis; Time; Work Environment; Korean subject-predicate honorific agreement; Sentence processing; Language use experience; Attraction effect
• ISSN: 0090-6905; 1573-6555; 1573-6555
• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-020-09737-0

Attraction effects arise when a comprehender erroneously retrieves a distractor instead of a target item during memory retrieval operations. In Korean, considerable processing difficulties occur in the agreement relation checking between a subject and an honorific-marked predicate when an intervening distractor carries a non-honorific feature. We investigate how attraction effects are managed during the processing of Korean subject-predicate honorific agreement by two Korean-speaking groups with different language use experience backgrounds: college students and airline workers. Results showed that both groups demonstrated stable knowledge of the honorific agreement in the acceptability judgment task. In the self-paced reading task, the airline group, who used honorifics extensively in their workplace, was less affected by the attraction effect than the student group. Our findings suggest that long-term language use experience can modulate how language users manage potential influence from attraction effects in real-time sentence processing.