Online Processing of Aspectual Coercion in English and Korean: Comparisons Between L1 Speakers and Korean Learners of English

It has been argued that the combination of semelfactive verbs and durational modifiers such as in the baby hiccupped for an hour causes an aspectual mismatch, and therefore additional processing time is necessary to reanalyze the event as iterative (e.g., Brennan and Pylkkänen 2008, Piñango et al. 1999, 2006, Todorova et al. 2000). This process of reinterpretation is called aspectual coercion. The current study investigates whether this process proceeds in the same manner in Korean and English with Korean and English monolinguals and further tests processing of English aspectual coercion by Korean learners of English. Experiment 1 examines online and offline processing of aspectual coercion in Korean. Results show that aspectually coerced sentences are processed faster than control sentences and are also rated to be more natural. Experiment 2 investigates the same structure in English with Korean learners of English and English native speakers. Both groups did not slow down in processing aspectually coerced sentences compared to control sentences although coerced sentences were rated to be less natural in the offline measure. In summary, the current study shows that aspectual coercion is processed differently in the two languages. However, despite such differences in the L1 and L2, Korean learners of English behave similarly to English native speakers in processing English aspectual coercion both in online and offline measures.