We explore how morphological cue occurrence and frequency-based heuristics interplay during sentence comprehension in Korean, a lesser-studied language in this respect. Two self-paced reading experiments with a suffixal passive construction (verb-final vs. verb-initial) and a morphological causative construction (verb-initial in comparison to the same word-order pattern in the suffixal passive) revealed that the heuristics (canonicity of word order; typicality of form-function parings involving case-marking) affected processing behaviours more strongly than the expected advantage of an early-arriving morphological cue in comprehension. Our findings support the heuristic-before-algorithm processing architecture, which is driven by the general property of human cognition that continuously seeks to reduce the burden of work at hand at the earliest opportunities. This appeals to the online cognitive equilibrium hypothesis that argues for the processor’s propensity to enter and remain in the state of cognitive equilibrium as early and long as possible during processing.

This study investigates how L2 learners achieve the ‘good-enough’ comprehension in Korean. We focus on a suffixal passive construction, given the scarcity of this construction in the L2 textbook input. Results from acceptability judgement and self-paced reading tasks suggest two aspects of L2 comprehension. First, L1 and L2 comprehension do not qualitatively differ regarding ‘good-enough’ processing: the L2 processor utilises both heuristic and algorithmic parsing to reduce the burden of work at hand. Second, the divergence of L1 and L2 processing behaviours during comprehension may originate from various factors around L2 learners (e.g., L2 input, L1–L2 interface, task types), which are assumed to anchor the noisier representations of L2 knowledge.