The role of syntactic structure in three-year-olds’ acquisition of Korean novel adjectives

This study investigates whether Korean-speaking three-year-olds use syntactic structure to support interpretation of novel adjectives in adnominal modification. Children were assigned to one of two conditions: a Coordination condition, where a familiar adjective and a novel item were conjoined with -ko in an adnominal modifier (e.g., [cak-ko suma-n] kong ‘a small and suma ball’), and a Simple condition, where only the novel item appeared in the same adnominal position (e.g., [suma-n] kong ‘a suma ball’). In both conditions, children generalized the novel words to new objects that shared the trained target properties, and overall performance was similar across conditions. These findings suggest that Korean adnominal predicate morphology may itself provide a strong baseline cue toward predicate-based, property-oriented interpretations in this task. More broadly, the study contributes to cross-linguistic work on adjective learning and syntactic bootstrapping by highlighting how language-specific morphosyntax may shape the cue system children use when mapping novel words to object properties.