The Development of Three Korean Semantic Particles - nun , man , do - in 3 to 6 year - old Children

Lee, Sung Hee; Hwang, Mina

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(2): 24-45.

Sung Hee Lee^` , and Mina Hwang^`

이승희(Sung Hee Lee)| 황민아(Mina Hwang)

ABSTRACT

The present study was designed to investigate the development of three Korean semantic particles in young children aged 3 to 6 year s . T he children ' s comprehension of three semantic particles - nun , man , do - was tested using a picture pointing task. The production of the three semantic particles was measured during a picture description task u sing the part of the pictures presented in the comprehen sion task. For comprehension, the performance accuracy of 75 % was u sed as the criterion of acquisition of each. Given the criterion , the children appeared to comprehend sentences with nun and man correctly by age 4. However , for the sentence with the semantic particle do , the children of age 6 still exhibited difficulties in comprehension. For the production of each semantic particle, two separate measures were used: the number of children who produced it at least 2 times and the number of children who produced it at least 4 times. T he children appeared produce nun at the earliest age followed by do and man . For each semantic particle, the number of children who exhibited more than 75 % accuracy in the comprehension task to the number of children who produced it at least 4 times in the production task. Some discrepancies were observed between the performances of the two tasks, especially in man and do . For do , about 40 % of the children of all ages produced it more than 4 times, whereas only one child showed 75 % of accuracy in comprehension by age 4. Strikingly , the children did not produce man very often even at the age of 6. T his result contradict s the early acquisition of man in comprehension.

Keywords: 언어발달 | 문법형태소 | 보조사