The acquisition of declarative and procedural knowledge on korean causative constructions by chinese learners of Korean

This study investigated whether Chinese-speaking L2 learners of Korean can acquire Korean causative constructions (i.e. morphological and analytic causatives) and make use of the relevant knowledge in real-time sentence comprehension. Korean morphological causatives allow the causee to be marked by an accusative case, but not by a nominative case. In contrast, Korean analytic causatives allow both accusative and nominative case marking for a causee. In an acceptability judgment task, L2 learners as a whole group (n = 60) failed to reject morphological causative sentences when the causee was marked by a nominative case. However, a subset of L2 learners (n = 28) showed target-like performance, rejecting the infelicitous morphological causatives that involved a nominative-marked causee. In a self-paced reading task, the same subset of L2 learners did not show sensitivity to the infelicitous morphological causatives with a nominative-marked causee, indicating their limitations in applying the knowledge to real-time language processing. We discuss these findings from the perspectives of L2 learners’ declarative and procedural knowledge of the Korean causative constructions and provide suggestions to teach the target constructions.