Processing the focus particle only in Korean L2 English learners’ sentence comprehension

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how Korean learners of English comprehend sentences in English containing the focus operator only. We conducted two experiments using picture judgement tasks which employed three types of questions (e.g., What happened?, subject question and object question), modeled after Hackl et al.'s (2015) study. Our results support Hackl et al.'s claim that the question “What happened?” requires an accommodation of more elaborate sub-questions, which Korean L2 English learners of intermediate and upper levels in English proficiency were not able to carry out effectively unlike L1 children. This indicates that Korean L2 English learners are influenced by their L1 in the course of learning only in English. Because they lack syntactic knowledge in the use of only as a VP operator in English, Korean L2 English learners have difficulty in identifying the focus of VP-only sentences.