earticle

영어

Establishing the referential dependency between the reflexive pronoun and its antecedent is needed to comprehend the sentence involving the reflexive anaphor. This study investigates how Korean English learners process reflexive pronouns using an offline acceptability judgement task and an online self-paced reading task. The offline task showed Korean learners were very sensitive to the syntactic constraint of the reflexive pronoun. The online task showed evidence of applying binding principle A at the reflexive region and the simultaneous processing of syntactic and semantic information for the referential dependency during reading. The result is consistent with the interactive-processing model that syntax and semantics have influences at the same time on the sentence processing. However, it is notable that syntactic information plays a more important role than semantic information in the processing of reflexive pronouns.