One of the most important issues in the study of language processing concerns the universality of sentence processing strategies across different languages (e.g. Hillert, 1998; de Vincenzi, 2000). As all researchers agree, if the goal of psycholinguistics is to study the human sentence processor and not the sentence processing mechanisms of a specific language, the test of universality is not an option but a necessary condition for evaluating various models of sentence processing.

Crosslinguistic comparisons of sentence processing can be attempted from two different perspectives. One is the universality hypothesis. It argues that there are universal processing strategies that apply to all languages, because processing strategies are independent of specific languages and are based on cognitive universals. The strategies or principles that could be considered as being universal are minimal attachment and late closure (Frazier, 1987;) as well as the minimal chain principle (de Vincenzi, 1991). These principles are assumed to operate in all languages, with only the ‘vocabulary,’ i.e. lexical items and specific grammar, differing across languages.

Another reason to do crosslinguistic studies might be the expectation that different languages show different processing strategies, under an assumption that parsing strategies are a reflection of language-specific characteristics and a by-product of exposure to a given language. Some processing strategies may not be universal but are instead language specific or parameterized (e.g. Mazuka, 1998). So, there is no need, at least in principle, to test the same strategy in different languages.

The basics of Korean

This chapter briefly introduces some characteristics of the Korean language and its writing system and gives an overview of the chapters treated in this volume on Korean psycholinguistics.

Korean has the eleventh largest group of speakers in the world, approximately 73 million. Its dialects are mutually intelligible except for the Jeju (Cheyjwu) Island dialect, which retains old forms but is becoming endangered.

Korean has an SOV (subject-object-verb) head-final feature like Japanese and unlike Chinese or English. Sentence types such as declarative, interrogative, imperative and promissive are distinguished by means of markers that appear at the end. Nominals take case markers or postpositions after them and verb stems take tense, modal, speech level, and S-type markers linearly in that order after them agglutinatively. It is similar to Japanese in this respect. Honorification is a pragmatically motivated syntactic agreement phenomenon to show the speaker's respect for the subject. Speech levels mark the speaker's various attitudes toward the hearer including (non-)politeness. Honorification in Korean is a little more grammatical than in Japanese. The three East-Asian languages are topic-prominent, with object deletion via topicality unlike pro-drop languages such as Romance languages, although Korean and Japanese have subject or nominative markers as well as topic markers, unlike Chinese. Korean and Japanese have SOV in both matrix and embedded Ss unlike German. Korean and Japanese have a null argument in a relative clause, which is coreferential with the head noun on the right hand side of the clause.

This is the third and last volume of the three-companion-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics. East Asian here includes Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the languages that have received increasing interest in psycholinguistic research beyond the Indo-European languages. The three languages reveal extremely interesting typological characteristics; Japanese and Korean are strikingly similar in structure and various other respects, although they show surprisingly important and subtle differences. Chinese, on the other hand, contrasts more sharply with Japanese and Korean in typological patterns, although the three share certain areal commonalities such as the use of numeral classifiers. Korean and Japanese are similar grammatically, but not lexically and phonologically. Because of many commonalities in grammar, the two languages are often compared and contrasted linguistically and psycholinguistically (see Japanese/Korean Linguistics 1 to 15, CSLI, among others). Korean is generally hypothesized to belong to the Altaic language family, which encompasses Manchu-Tungusic, Mongolian, and Turkic languages. Japanese is also often believed to be an Altaic language, whereas Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Korean and Japanese are thus distinct from Chinese genetically and typologically. However, the two languages have a vast amount of culturally borrowed Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese lexical items, respectively, even adopting Chinese characters minimally in Korean and vastly in Japanese in their writing systems.

Therefore, the idea of the trio in companion volumes is crucial for comparative studies, not only among the three but also between the three and other languages including English.