I became interested in language acquisition because it seemed to me that if we could understand what grammar is for the very young child, we would gain insight into its true nature. Pursuing this venture over the years, I have come to view grammar as fundamentally and profoundly mediated by discourse. As children and adults, we experience grammar in and through discourse, and it seems very likely that mental representations of grammar arising from this experience are permeated with discourse information. In my work on the acquisition of Korean argument structure, I take a discourse-functional approach, analyzing argument structure as a multi-level phenomenon, encompassing the factors that motivate speakers to encode arguments with different surface forms at the discourse level, the interactional functions served by transitive and intransitive verbs at the lexical level, and the semantic and discourse-pragmatic bases for assigning referents to grammatical roles and marking them morphologically at the clause level. When we locate grammar in discourse, we also situate it in a specific cultural context. In my work on language socialization, I have tried to understand the role that language plays in the process by which young children learn to think, feel and act, as well as to speak, in culture-specific ways. Grammar in use exists in constant interaction with human cognition and culture; trying to understand this interplay is what motivates me most as a psycholinguist.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

In Press. Dialogic priming and the acquisition of argument marking in Korean. In J. Guo, E. Lieven, S. Ervin-Tripp, N. Budwing, S. Őzçalişkan, K. Nakamura (eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

In Press. The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: A discourse-functional approach. In P. Li (ed.), Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Part III: Korean Psycholinguistics , C. Lee, Y. Kim, and G. Simpson (eds.). London: Cambridge University Press.

In Press. Discourse-functional correlates of argument structure in Korean acquisition. In N. McGloin (ed.), Japanese/Korean Linguistics 15, 1-20. Stanford: CSLI Online Publications.

2007. Deontic conditionals and desirability: Structure and socialization in child-directed speech. In S. Kuno, S. Makino, & S. Strauss (eds.), Aspects of Linguistics: In Honor of Noriko Akatsuka, 3-17. Tokyo: Kurosio.

2004. The discourse basis of constructions: Some evidence from Korean. In Proceedings of the 32nd Stanford Child Language Research Forum, E. Clark (ed.).

2003. The lexicon in interaction: Developmental origins of Preferred Argument Structure in Korean. In J. W. Du Bois, L. Kumpf, and W. Ashby (eds.), Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as architecture for function. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

 

CURRENT PROJECTS

• A discourse-functional approach to the acquisition of argument structure in Korean caregiverchild discourse
• The role of dialogic priming in the acquisition of argument marking in Korean
• Double-nominative constructions in Korean acquisition

COURSES TAUGHT

• Linguistics 127: Psychology of Language
• Linguistics 137/237: First Language Acquisition
• Linguistics 138: Language Socialization
• Linguistics 180: Language in American Ethnic Minority Groups
• Linguistics 226: Language and Cognition
• Linguistics 257: Seminar in Psycholinguistics
  - Recent seminar topic: Argument Structure
• Linguistics 265: Acquisition of Grammar 
• Linguistics 266: Acquisition of Discourse