Youngon Choi

Chung-Ang University · Department of Psychology

Although children generally regard adults as more knowledgeable than their peers, an informant's past accuracy trumps age when in conflict. In a recent study, however, Korean 5‐year‐olds were more likely to trust a less accurate adult informant over a more accurate peer informant when learning new information. To examine whether such a pattern was...

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants’ phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and langua...

In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants' perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language's distinct categorization of sounds. Unlike many fricative contrasts utilized in most of the world's languages, Korean fricati...

Objectives: The goal of the present article is to provide an in-depth review of past studies on infant speech perception. Based on an extensive review, we aim to provide an overview of the field and to propose important roles that research on Korean and Korean-learning infants can play to further test and advance exiting theories. Methods: We condu...

The Korean fit distinction has been at the center of a debate about whether language can influence spatial concepts. Most research on this issue has largely assumed that the concepts that support Korean fit terms are signaled by innate abstract visual cues (e.g., relative motion of objects), while linguistic studies in Korean suggest that fit terms...

People use language to communicate their perceptions and conceptions of the world, and underlying this communication is the linguistic system that interacts with the human perceptual and conceptual machinery. This is supported by research on sentence comprehension among adults. This chapter examines theories of sentence processing in children and a...

How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference. This volume brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the wor...

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguatin...

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous...

Korean children's ability to use prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was studied using two types of ambiguity. First, we examined a word-segmentation ambiguity in which placement of the phrasal boundary leads to different interpretations of a sentence. Next, we examined a syntactic ambiguity in which the same words were differently grouped...

According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) [Best et al., JEP:HPP 14, 345–360 (1988)], the difficulties that second‐language learners have in distinguishing non‐native phoneme contrasts is predictable from the way learners assimilate the non‐native sounds into their native phonological system. The present study examined Korean and Japanese...