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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. 452–477

Chapter 14
Pragmatic bootstrapping in Korean children with autistic spectrum disorder

 | Midwest University | Sogang University
 | Hanshin University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of pragmatic bootstrapping in Korean children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The main focus is the development of socio-pragmatic functions of joint attention (JA) and how they relate to the acquisition of subject-modal agreement. In exploring this issue, we take an integrative perspective: Spontaneous speech data obtained at various ages from Korean-speaking children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children are analyzed with respect to dyadic and triadic JA, speech acts (Grice, 1975; Searle, 1969), and subject-modal agreement in Korean modal verb suffixes. Results reveal a limited capacity for triadic JA in ASD children, whereas Korean TD children show an early sensitivity (from 1;8) to the socio-pragmatic functions of JA. These findings lead us to conclude that, given their presumably prelinguistic predisposition to seek mutual awareness with their social interlocutors, children can leverage their socio-pragmatic abilities to bootstrap their way into the acquisition of grammar.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The pragmatic bootstrapping hypothesis
  • 3.Joint attention
    • 3.1Dyadic and triadic joint attention
    • 3.2Triadic joint attention (TJA) and the emergence of grammar
  • 4.Korean children with and without ASD
    • 4.1Development of triadic joint attention
    • 4.2Development of subject-modal person agreement in TD and ASD children learning Korean
    • 4.3Morphosyntactic awareness: Errors in the use of modal suffixes
    • 4.4Summary
  • 5.Conclusions and future research directions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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