Abstract

This study attempts to explore whether explicit or implicit negative evidence plays a role in Korean language acquisition. It analyzes a longitudinal production data form tow Korean children whose age ranges from 2 ; 0 to 3 ; 5. The four types of syntactic error that most frequently occur in our data are tabulated ; 1) overgeneralization error in nominative case-marking pattern in Korean. 2) the wrongly inserted the complimetizer 'ke'. 3) several morphological errors with regard to the complement construction or inflectional elements. 4) the word order of negative constructions. There are two kinds of criterion for the analysis. Maternal responses that followed the child's sentences are asigned to one of the following 8 categories ; 1) Exact Repetition 2) Contrated Repetition 3) Expanded repetition 4) Corrective Recast 5) Confirmation Question 6) Topic Continuation 7) No Response 8) Explicit Response. The listed responses expet Explicit response may by considered as an implicit negative evidence. The child's response in the utterance preceded by the adult's response is coded into one of the 4 categories ; 1) Imitation of the adult's target 2) Repetition for original child sentence 3) Topic continuation 4) No Response. The overall results are as follows ; 1) Neither explicit negative evidence nor implicit negative evidence does not play any role in Korean language acquisition. 2) Although there are small number of audit's corrections on the children's grammatical error, children never notice them at all. The results suggest that the language acquisition preceeds on a schedule of some innate constraints rather than the negative evidence.