A Study of the Acquisition of Korean Nominative Case by Korean Sign Language Speakers in Variant Word Orders and Double Nominative Constructions

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of Nominative Case in Korean among adult Korean Sign Language (KSL) speakers in comparison to children who are acquiring Korean as their first language. Various grammaticality judgment tests yielded the following results: First, the adult KSL learners of Korean performed significantly better than the child learners under various word orders. Conversely, under various Double Nominative Construction environments, it was the child learners who performed significantly better than the KSL speakers. Second, the KSL speakers showed significantly different results depending on certain verb types while the child learners did not. Overall, these results provide support for the view that KSL speakers are second language learners of Korean, not first language learners.