SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this study, we investigate European learners’ preference towards subject relative clauses (SR) and object relative clauses (OR) in L2 Korean. The objective of the study is to examine two competing proposals of the filler-gap dependency: Structural Distance Hypothesis (SDH) and Linear Distance Hypothesis (LDH). Recent empirical findings on the acquisition of the head-final relative clauses (RCs) of East Asian languages are far from conclusive, whereas the results of studies on English and other European languages have been mostly supportive of the SDH. We carried out a listening comprehension task by English learners of the Korean language and a free composition task by Dutch learners of the Korean language and found that English speakers process OR faster than SR, whereas Dutch speakers produce SR more than OR. The results show that English speakers’ processing of Korean RCs is compatible with LDH while Dutch speakers’ production of Korean RCs is consistent with SDH. The empirical findings of our experiments represent that neither SDH nor LDH can fully explain European learners’ processing and production of Korean RCs. In this respect, we propose that SDH and LDH are complementary to explaining the acquisition of Korean RCs rather than two contradicting concepts on working memory. Accordingly, we argue that both analytic and synthetic approaches are required to explain the acquisition of RCs in L2 Korean.