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Much research in the functional linguistics literature suggests that the use of zero pronouns is driven by the degree of interclausal connection. Kim (1990, 1992) claims that in clause chain languages such as Korean and Japanese, zero pronouns are primarily used following an interclausal connective with a tight interclausal connection that maintains subject continuity (whether the subject referent is maintained or changed in the following clause) and action continuity (temporal sequence or action sequence is continued or interrupted in the following clause). Consistent with the claim, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that Korean speakers used more zero pronouns following a connective with higher subject continuity (Experiment 1) and action continuity (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect of connectives was observed when grammatical role, referential predictability, and coherence relation were controlled for (Experiment 2). These results are best explained by assuming the role of discourse continuity on referential form choice.

The present study investigates how L2 learners adapt their production preferences following immediate and cumulative experience with a syntactic structure when an L2 structure differs from an L1 structure in terms of verb subcategorization frame and argument structure. Korean learners of English described causative events in English in a picture-matching game. The meaning of a causative sentence in English (e.g., "Jen had her computer fixed") is expressed with an active transitive sentence in Korean (e.g., "Jen-NOM computer-ACC fixed"). The results demonstrated that both immediate and cumulative experience with a causative structure increased the likelihood of producing grammatical causative descriptions (e.g., "Jen had her computer fixed"), while decreasing the production of ungrammatical active transitive descriptions (e.g., "Jen fixed her computer"). The findings provide novel evidence that an implicit learning mechanism is involved in L2 learners' processing and learning of an L2 structure that is different from L1.

A Bayesian Model proposed by Kehler et al. ([2008]. Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25(1), 1–44. ) suggests that pronoun production and interpretation are driven by a different set of factors following the Bayes' rule. Evidence suggests that the Bayesian Model makes better predictions on pronoun interpretation compared to other models that assume that pronoun production and interpretation are influenced by the same set of factors. Yet, it remains unclear precisely to what extent the Bayesian Model can capture this relationship. The current study examines the validity of the Bayesian Model by comparing its performance across three different contexts using a variety of evaluation methods. Our results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model's performance varied across contexts and consistently underestimated the subject bias in interpretation. We suggest that the underestimation is likely because the subject bias in pronoun production is not sufficient to account for the subject bias in actual interpretation, contra to the assumption of the Bayesian Model. We discuss potential sources of the additional subject bias in interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it results from the influence of non-linguistic conceptual similarity between discourse entities. To adjudicate between the two accounts, the present study investigates how Mandarin speakers choose referring expressions in written and spoken Mandarin. As written and spoken Mandarin differ in their referential ambiguity (the third-person singular pronoun is gender-ambiguous in spoken Mandarin but not in written Mandarin), it provides a good testing ground for evaluating the two accounts with the manipulation of gender similarity. We found that Mandarin speakers' pronoun use was affected by pronoun ambiguity but not by conceptual similarity of discourse entities. In particular, in written Mandarin, where pronouns are gender-specific, Mandarin speakers produced fewer pronouns when there was more than one character that matched the gender of the pronoun. In spoken Mandarin where pronouns are gender-ambiguous, however, Mandarin speakers' pronoun use was not influenced by gender of discourse characters. Our findings suggest that the gender effect is driven by an ambiguity-avoidance strategy rather than conceptual similarity between discourse characters.

Languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English ("Jen had her computer fixed") is conveyed using an active structure in Korean ("Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed"), and yet little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such constructions. The present study investigated whether late bilinguals develop shared or language-specific representations for crosslinguistically different (causatives) and similar (transitives) constructions. Using between-language structural priming, Experiment 1 showed that proficient Korean-English bilinguals exhibited a stronger priming effect for transitives than did less proficient bilinguals. Using a picture-sentence verification task, Experiment 2 showed that proficient bilinguals were more likely to apply the rules of Korean causatives to the processing of English causatives than were less proficient bilinguals. Our results suggest that Korean-English bilinguals share syntactic representations for both similar and different constructions, indicating that the bilingual system is highly integrated.

One of the central questions in speech production is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function. According to the lexical hypothesis (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994), verbs play a key role in this process (e.g., "send" and "receive" result in different entities being assigned to the subject position). In contrast, according to the structural hypothesis (e.g., Bock, Irwin, & Davidson, 2004), grammatical functions can be assigned based on a speaker's conceptual representation of an event, even before a particular verb is chosen. In order to examine the role of the verb in grammatical function assignment, we investigated whether English and Korean speakers exhibit semantic interference effects for verbs during a scene description task. We also analyzed speakers' eye movements during production. We found that English speakers exhibited verb interference effects and also fixated the action/verb region before the subject region. In contrast, Korean speakers did not show any verb interference effects and did not fixate the action/verb region "before" the subject region. Rather, in Korean, looks to the action/verb region sharply increased following looks to the object region. The findings provide evidence for the lexical hypothesis for English and are compatible with the structural hypothesis for Korean. We suggest that whether the verb is retrieved before speech onset depends on the role that the verb plays in grammatical function assignment or structural choice in a particular language.

This study investigates the R&D persistence with different external conditions based on US listed manufacturing firms for the period 2011–2019. Specifically, we analyze whether the fluctuation of R&D investment is related to short-term changes in sales, and how industrial technological intensity and competitive environment influence the relationship. We used the cost asymmetry model to identify the changes in R&D investment by sales behaviour. The results showed that the R&D investment of high-tech firms was stickier when sales declined as compared to low-tech firms. Therefore, R&D persistence tends to be strong in high-tech firms. In addition, R&D persistence was weakened by the competitive environment, and this finding was more pronounced for high-tech firms than for low-tech firms. This study has academic implications in the empirical analysis of the relationship between R&D persistence and external characteristics from a dynamic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two written sentence completion experiments, I tested whether the choice of nominative and topic markers is subserved by the same mechanisms as anaphor choice and referent choice in Korean. I found that morphological marker choice was sensitive to various factors including connective, grammatical role, and verb semantics, whereas anaphor choice was sensitive only to grammatical role. I also found that morphological marker choice did not systematically vary with verb semantics unlike referent choice. These findings reveal two important properties of referential form production. One is that morphological marker choice relies on different mechanisms than underlie anaphor choice and referent choice. Another is that connective plays a significant role in determining referential form. Despite its role in referent choice and pronoun comprehension, connective has received little attention in current models of referential form production. The current study is the first to systematically test the effect of connective on referential form choice and to demonstrate its effect on morphological marker choice. By revealing how morphological marker choice is related to anaphor choice and referent choice, and identifying the factors that influence morphological marker choice, the results of the study improve our theoretical understanding of morphological marker production and reference production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many linguistic theories suggest that thematic role accessibility influences speakers’ choice of sentence structure. We examine the nature of the relationship between thematic role accessibility and grammatical encoding by evaluating how thematic role accessibility influences grammatical function assignment and word order during on-line production of Korean. We found that role accessibility influenced word order in Korean in Experiments 1 and 2: Korean speakers were more likely to put agent nouns to an earlier sentence position than patient nouns. In Experiment 2, we also found that thematic role accessibility influenced grammatical function assignment: Korean speakers were more likely to assign agent nouns to the subject function than patient nouns. These findings suggest that thematic role accessibility affects both word order and grammatical function assignment. We discuss the implication of our results for current theories of language production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]