Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Motivated by the two contrasting forces in shaping linguistic knowledge—efficiency and redundancy, the present study examines sentence comprehension behaviour amongst Korean children aged three to six, focusing on verbs (relative to case markers) in interpreting transitive events. Through picture-selection experiments that systematically omit and obscure portions of transitive sentences, we find (1) a reduced role of verbs in sentence comprehension and (2) age-related variations in the application of case-marking knowledge. These findings suggest that verbs may sometimes become redundant during comprehension, which is attributable to early maturation and strong automatisation of verbs. This provides support for verb-periphery strategies so as to maximise efficiency in language activities amongst Korean preschoolers.