Second Language Acquisition of Korean Nominative Case Drop by Native Speakers of English

ABSTRACT This study investigated second language (L2) learners’ knowledge of nominative case drop in Korean by using the same written task from Chung (2018) that examined bilingual acquisition of accusative case drop using three factors: Focus, Animacy, and Definiteness. Previous studies have found that integrating multiple types of information, especially discourse-pragmatic information, often results in L2 variability and incomplete acquisition, and testing the learners’ knowledge of nominative case drop can provide further insights into the nature of this difficulty. The results of the written task showed that the learners were variable in integrating contextual information and displayed a strong tendency to rely on basic syntactic or semantic processes. However, unlike previous studies, the learners seemed capable of integrating multiple types of information into a systematic pattern of judgments. Such findings are indicative of L2 interlanguage at work and call for more explicit and detailed instruction on the workings of context-inferred cues in Korean language classrooms.