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In:Acquisition of Korean: The state of the art
Edited by Soonja Choi
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 36] 2026
► pp. 78–116

Chapter 3
L1 acquisition of lexicon and morphology in Korean

 | San Diego State University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
The chapter examines the development of lexicon and morphology in Korean children, from the single-word stage to early sentence construction stage (18 months to 4 years of age) with a crosslinguistic perspective. The analysis draws upon existing literature as well as the author’s own database. The following aspects are highlighted: (a) early lexical development, (b) the development of nominal and verbal morphology, (c) the roles of frequency in child-directed speech (CDS), grammatical structure, and caregiver-child interaction, and (d) the impact of cognitive mechanisms and language-specific structures on first language acquisition. The final section examines the expression of motion events in Korean vs. French learners, focusing on how Korean children utilize the lexical and morpho-syntactic features they have acquired.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexicon and morphology during the single-word stage
    • 2.1Lexical categories and language-specific patterns at the single-word stage
      • 2.1.1Methodological challenges in the lexical categorization of single-word utterances
    • 2.2Verb lexicon and morphology during the single-word stage
    • 2.3Early acquisition of the language-specific semantics of spatial verbs
  • 3.Emerging grammar during the two-word stage
    • 3.1The semantic relations expressed in two-word combinations
    • 3.2Noun and verb inflections during the two-word stage
  • 4.Development of noun inflections in early sentences (2;0 to 4;0)
    • 4.1Plural marker ‑tul
    • 4.2Nominative, accusative, and topic markers: ‑Ka/-i, -(l)ul, and -(n)un
    • 4.3Dative and locative case markers: ‑Ey, ‑eyta -eyse, and ‑hanthey
      • 4.3.1Early-acquired distinctions in the use of locative/dative case markers: Ey vs. eyta and ‑ey vs. hanthey
      • 4.3.2Later-acquired distinctions in the use of locative/dative case markers: ‑Ey vs. ‑eyse and hanthey vs. ‑lul
  • 5.Verb morphology: Tense, aspect and modality
    • 5.1Tense and aspect
    • 5.2Modality
      • 5.2.1Sentence-ending suffixes: Epistemic modality, evidentiality, and discourse pragmatics
      • 5.2.2Auxiliary verb constructions (AVCs): Deontic modality
  • 6.Serial verb constructions
  • 7.Development of motion event expressions in Korean: A crosslinguistic comparison
  • 8.Conclusions and future research directions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
References (80)
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