The Role of Frequency in the Processing of giving and receiving Events in Korean

This study aimed to examine the processing benefits of frequency information associated with the case marker -eykey in comprehending Korean declarative sentences. By using a picture description task in which pictures ambiguously illustrated either a giving event (-eykeyREC ... cwuta ‘give ... to’) or a receiving event (-eykeySOURCE ... patta ‘receive ... from’), we found that giving events were predominantly preferred to receiving events. The results of the online sentence comprehension study revealed that 1) give-type verbs were integrated into sentences faster than receive-type verbs overall and 2) the reading-time differences between the verb types were significant when role NPs were canonically ordered (NP-eykey ... NP-(l)ul) but not when they were noncanonically presented (NP-(l)ul ... NP-eykey). We claim that structural and semantic frequency bias associated with -eykey facilitates readers’ anticipatory processing in the integration of upcoming information. We further discuss how the processing differences in giving and receiving events might attribute to the argument-adjunct distinction between recipients and sources.