Telicity in Korean EFL Learners’ Interlanguage

This study explores how Korean learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) develop an understanding of telicity, focusing on their ability to interpret telic and atelic events within their interlanguage, especially at the low and intermediate proficiency stages. Telicity, which refers to whether an event has a natural endpoint, is challenging for EFL learners as it relies on specific compositional structures in English. To evaluate learners' sensitivity to telicity, this study employs a naturalness judgment task, where participants rate the naturalness of sentences designed to test their grasp of telicity. The experimental task includes intransitive activity verbs combined with various prepositional phrases (locative and goal PPs) and noun phrases, as well as transitive change-of-state verbs paired with different types of noun phrases (an indefinite noun phrase, a definite noun phrase, a bare plural noun phrase, and a quantized noun phrase). This design allows for a detailed assessment of learners' sensitivity to the compositional properties that indicate telicity. Findings reveal that learners’ ability to distinguish between telic and atelic events improves as their proficiency advances, suggesting a developmental progression in their acquisition of telicity. These results contribute to the understanding of the interlanguage of Korean EFL learners, highlighting the gradual improvement in processing telicity through increased exposure and proficiency. Ultimately, this study provides valuable insights into the patterns of telicity acquisition and the challenges EFL learners face in mastering such nuanced semantic concepts in a second language.