Soo-Keun Cho (General Education English Program, Sogang University). 2000. Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Korean (한국어 관계절 연구). Language Information. Volume 4. 143-160.
The purpose of this article is to investigate how children acquire relative clauses in Korean focusing on the four different gap positions: subject, object, dative, and oblique. The experiment that we conducted involves a comprehension task, in which a picture-selection procedure is employed. The subject for the experiment consist of 40 Korean monolingual children. The results from the experiment show that children as old as 5 have difficulty in comprehending relative clauses. The results also show that relative clauses with a subject gap are easier to comprehend than relative clauses with an object/dative/oblique gap, and that relative clauses with an oblique gap are the most difficult to comprehend. We can account for the the subject gap preference in terms of the structural distance suggested by O'Grady(1997).