Sequential vs. Simultaneous Processing of Collective Nouns by Korean Learners of English: A Log-linear Analysis with R

Abstract

Collective nouns in English can trigger both subject-verb and (reflexive) pronoun number agreement. It has often been reported that as for native speakers of English, collective nouns tend to induce singular subject-verb agreement and plural pronoun agreement (cf. Levin (2001)). Based on these distinct agreement phenomena, it has been argued that the first subject-verb agreement is a syntactic process, whereas the second pronoun agreement is a notional or semantic process (ibid.). This paper examines how Korean learners of English (KLsE) understand the divergent patterns of number markings on verbs and pronouns both in sequential contexts where subject-verb and pronoun agreement occur in two separate sentences, and simultaneous contexts where they occur in the same sentence. We propose a log- linear regression analysis with R on a set of data extracted from the questionaries which gives a perspective to investigate the research questions in this paper by proving a model that is statistically valid. It is concluded that a model of three-way interactions among the factors such as pronoun, verb, and context with all the collective nouns provides an optimal way to explain the distribution of the data. Specifically, this paper shows that KLsE processed the two different contexts distinctly. There was no interaction found between subject-verb and pronoun agreement in the sequential contexts, but there was in the simultaneous contexts. This confirms that subject-verb and pronoun agreement are discrete processes, but they may interact in a certain context.