Case marker use and loss in Korean immigrant students

Abstract

In this thesis, I examined the first language attrition of Korean immigrant children who have been in public school in the U.S.A for more than two years. Based on the diaries of 10 Korean bilinguals and monolinguals, this thesis describes the differences of the use of nominative, accusative, and topic markers and null subject /null object, and it discusses possible explanations for the discovered errors with case markers. In order to do so, writing samples from both Austin and Korea group were collected and sorted by grade. As for the bilingual school children, the results of data analysis show that bilinguals omit nominative, accusative, and topic marker more frequently than monolinguals in kindergarten. The bilinguals do not produce the honorific nominative marker –kkeyse. They also make more errors with case markers because of lack of language input and language interference.