earticle

영어

The early production of temporal-aspectual features in English-speaking children is typically biased; they prefer telic perfective past combinations and atelic imperfective present combinations. Wagner (2009) replicated this finding with adult native English speakers. The current study explored the question of whether such a preference for these prototypes would persist into second language acquisition with Korean speakers. Given that the tense-aspect system is part of semantic universals shared by all languages, it was predicted that Korean speakers would show an influence of such prototypes. Korean speakers indeed judged prototypical temporal-aspectual combinations to be better than non-prototypical ones. Along the lines of Wagner (2009), we argue that the driving force for the preference for prototypes is information processing demands: The prototypes are favored because they are easier to compute and process.