Acquisition of Korean

“This book is a tour de force that offers a fresh, new vision of the Korean language. It captures the scientific yet beautiful trajectory of how language evolves from a self-centered tool into a sophisticated bridge between the individual and the world. For professionals working with children with atypical developmental patterns, this book is a gift; it provides a crucial developmental framework for understanding and explaining the unique linguistic world of autistic children. It shifts our stance from simply 'listening' to truly 'understanding' their development from the child’s point of view. As interest in Korean culture reaches new heights globally, this book is a must-read for those who want to feel the pulse of the Korean language as a living, breathing entity.”

“This superbly curated set of chapters provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in the acquisition and development of Korean. Part I is a review of the development of Korean as a first language, done in a comprehensive and atheoretical way. Part II does the same for L2, bilingual and heritage development, and Part III provides an extremely valuable set of chapters including one on the development of Korean Sign Language. The editor, Soonja Choi, has assembled a series of articles that sews topics from disparate domains into a cohesive set of chapters that, together, provide what is truly the state of the art of the acquisition of Korean. This book is sure to be the touchstone reference for the acquisition of Korean for the foreseeable future.”

“This book is an important milestone in the quest to understand human language through its acquisition. The quest demands detailed attention to the structures of individual languages and the cultural worlds in which they are embedded. Here we have a model for broad and deep exploration of an individual language, Korean. The reader will gain an understanding of how the language works and how it is acquired as a first or second language, including chapters on atypical learners. These fifteen chapters skillfully examine many dimensions of Korean linguistic structures while also attending to the growing child’s cognitive and social development. A wide range of researchers and practitioners will be grateful to Soonja Choi for this state of the art contribution to the study of language development, both comparative and language-specific.”

“This volume stands as a rare achievement: a work in which science and the humanities meet not as distant cousins but as natural partners, illuminating one another with grace and precision. Acquisition of Korean: The State of the Art brings together an extraordinary range of scholarship—phonological, syntactic, cognitive, social, developmental, and cultural—yet it never loses sight of the human beings whose linguistic journeys it traces. What impressed me most is the way the chapters collectively reveal Korean not simply as a linguistic system but as a lived experience shaped by families, communities, sensory worlds, and the moral imagination of caregivers. The inclusion of heritage learners, bilingual contexts, Deaf children acquiring Korean Sign Language, and children with atypical developmental profiles makes this volume especially valuable; it widens our understanding of what it means to acquire a language and, in doing so, deepens our understanding of what it means to be human. Soonja Choi has curated a work that is both rigorous and humane, offering a model for how cross-disciplinary inquiry can flourish when scientific insight and humanistic sensitivity are allowed to speak to each other. This book will serve not only as an indispensable reference but also as a reminder that language development is one of the most beautiful places where empirical knowledge and human experience meet productively and, indeed, happily.”