Second and heritage language acquisition of Korean case drop*
The primary objective of this paper is to investigate how early and late bilinguals attain implicit knowledge of Korean case drop that necessitates integration of multiple levels of information. An oral picture description task and a written forced choice elicitation task were developed to investigate how different populations employ the relevant factors in Korean case drop and if certain types of cues are more accessible than others. The results reveal qualitative differences in the underlying linguistic knowledge of early vs. late bilinguals with early bilinguals achieving a higher level of mastery than late bilinguals in both oral and written tasks. The results underline the importance of age, context, and mode of acquisition and suggest that bilingual difficulty in the present phenomenon mainly arises from learners heavily relying on cues that are readily available to them in their respective context of acquisition and failing to effectively coordinate multiple constraints.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition