Jeon, K. Seon. 2014. Language Processing Difficulty in the Development of Negation: The Case of L2 Korean negation. Language Information. Volume 19. 145-166. Studies on the development of L2 negation suggest that preverbal negation is learned earlier than postverbal negation regardless of a learner’s first language background. Korean provides avenues of L2 negation research because it allows both preverbal and postverbal negative constructions. The current paper aims to propose a rank order of processing difficulty involved in different types of errors committed by learners acquiring Korean as a foreign language. Twenty-four second language learners of Korean enrolled in two intermediate courses at a university participated in this investigation. An Elicited Imitation (EI) task was administered to each learner. EI accuracy scoring showed that a higher level of processing difficulty was required in repeating post-verbally negated stimuli than in repeating pre-verbally negated ones. Five different types of errors were identified, and an implicational pattern of these error types was found. Among the five types of errors, the conversion of post-verbal into grammatical pre-verbal negation was the most frequently committed error. This indicates learners’ simplification strategy for ease of production in preverbal negation while fully processing negative meaning in a postverbal construction. The results are also consistent with the prediction made by the typological markedness theory (Dahl 1979) and Processibility Theory (Pienemann 1999, 2007) claiming that preverbal negation appears earlier in the development than its postverbal counterpart.
key words: language processing, Korean negation, second language acquisition, Elicited Imitation, implicational scale