earticle

영어

The current study investigated 5- to 6-year-old Korean children’s comprehension of two postpositional particles, do ʻalsoʼ and man ʻonlyʼ, using a picture-pointing task. In Experiment 1 in which there was no context sentence prior to test sentences, the children correctly understood the meaning of sentences including ‘man’, whereas they had difficulties in understanding sentences including ‘do’. However, in Experiment 2 in which the test sentences were preceeded by a context sentence describing a character in the pictures, the children correctly understood sentences including ‘do’ as well as sentences including ‘man.’ These results suggest that at least by 5 years of age, Korean children acquire the meaning of postpositional particles ‘man’ and ‘do.’ When a proper contextual information is provided, 5- to 6-year-old children who were reported that they could not understand the meaning of ‘do’ in the earlier research can comprehend the meaning of ‘do’ and ‘man’.