Japanese/Korean Linguistics

Previous literature agrees (J. M. Yoon 1989, Kang 1998) that Korean native speakers differentiate three reflexive forms (caki, casin, caki-casin) via their binding distance preference. However, most previous empirical research has been conducted via comprehension/corpus-based methods; there is a lack of elicited oral production controlling for speaker consistency, making it difficult to fully understand the treatment of Korean reflexives by native speakers.  
 The current study investigated the treatment of Korean reflexives in comprehension and production. For local binding, caki-casin was uniformly preferred. For long-distance binding, however, comprehension and production diverged. In comprehension, speakers preferred caki, but caki-casin was produced most, despite being dispreferred in comprehension (p < 0.001). This misalignment can be considered evidence of caki-casin becoming a preferentially local reflexive licensed as a logophor in long-distance contexts, consistent with previous research (J.H. Kim & J. Yoon 2009, E.H. Kim & J. Yoon 2020, J.H. Kim & Y.H. Lee 2022).