Children's Comprehension and Production of Compound Nouns in ...

Children’s Comprehension and Production of Compound Nouns in Korean
It is a well-known fact that compound nouns formed from root plus root nouns (e.g., birthday
party) have various meanings in English and therefore might cause the learnability problem to
children (Clark 1981, Clark et al. 1985, Fabb 1998, Gottfried 1997). This study aims to examine
whether Korean-speaking children aged 3 to 4 know that compound nouns refer to interacting
objects, and whether they know the subcatgorization function of compound nouns, based on
production and comprehension task.
Interesting factors related to children’s acquisition of compound nouns are whether they
understand the various meaning of compound nouns, and whether they acquire the
subcategorization function of compound nouns. For example, a cereal box denotes a box
containing cereal. A rabbit hat can always be a hat, but it could be many kinds of hats, including
a hat with a rabbit on it or a hat that a rabbit wears. In addition, compound nouns in English
usually denote interacting two objects. Clark et al. (1985) reported that English-speaking
children prefer to use compounds when describing two objects that were inherently related (such
as a pumpkin house for a house in the shape of a pumpkin) or semi-inherently related rather than
for objects that were accidentally related (such as frog fan for a frog posed on a fan). In spite of
the fact that the compounds may be different in the semantic relations between the two nouns,
one common fact is that they all serve a subcategorization function. That is, compounds formed
by noun plus noun are generally composed of a head noun and modifying noun. For example, in
a rabbit hat, the rightmost noun hat as a head and the leftmost noun rabbit function as a
modifying noun. This common fact is generally found across languages, regardless of whether
languages are right-headed or left-headed (Fabb 1998). Previous studies have shown that the
frequency and complexity of morphology in the input language play an important role in
children’s acquisition of the subcategorization function of compound nouns (Berman & Clark
1989, Clark 1993, Clark & Berman 1984, Clark et al. 1985, Mellenius 1996, Nicoladis 1999).
A recent study by Nicoladis (2003) examined whether English-speaking children could
understand the meaning of compound nouns that refer to interacting objects. She found that 3year-old
children and 4-year-old children equally produced compounds to name two interacting
objects (70% vs. 80%), whereas 3-year-old children less understood that compound nouns refer
to two interacting objects than 4-year-old children (52.2% vs. 67.5%). Her findings seem to
contrast with the previous literatures in that 3-year-old children's production was better than their
comprehension. It has been reported that children's comprehension and production of compound
nouns usually occurred at approximately the same age (Clark 1981, Clark et al. 1985, Gottfried
1997), whereas comprehension of the form exceeds production, when compound nouns involve
complex morphology (Berman & Clark 1987, 1989). Thus, it is an open question whether
children speaking other languages show a reverse pattern of mismatch between comprehension
and production. In addition, a mismatch between language production and comprehension has
been widely reported in both the language acquisition literature and the neurolinguistic literature.
These previous studies have suggested that children's comprehension usually precedes their
production in development.
This study partially replicated Nicoladis' (2003) experiment to investigate whether Koreanspeaking
children might know that compound nouns usually refer to two interacting objects. This
study further allowed us to find out whether children's production of novel compound nouns
exceeds their comprehension of compound nouns cross-linguistically. In addition, I investigated
whether Korean-speaking children at an early age might acquire the subcategorization function

of compound nouns. 30 Korean-speaking children aged 3 to 4 participated in this study. As in the
experiment by Nicoladis (2003), each child was asked to do two tasks: (1) compound production
and (2) compound comprehension. First, the compound production task included semi-inherently
related objects, that is, interacting objects, such as flowers decorating chairs. The children were
asked to look at one picture of multiple things, then another picture of multiple things and finally
to name the third picture (a combination of the previous two pictures). Next, on the compound
comprehension task, the children were shown an array of four different pictures, separated by
lines. All pictures included in the comprehension were different from those in the production
task. The pictures describe each thing alone, the things combined in some way and the things
next to each other. The children were asked to point to the named object in the array. Both the
production and comprehension task were conducted on a portable computer. In addition, the 10
test items and two filters for each task were also given to the participants.
Results from the study showed that the 3-year-old and the 4-year-old children equally
understood the meaning of compound nouns (83.3% vs. 94.7%). In contrast with the
comprehension task, 3-year-old children produced less compound nouns to name two interacting
objects than 4-year-old children (42.7% vs. 83.3%). Therefore, these results demonstrate that
Korean-speaking children's knowledge of producing compound nouns continues to develop
throughout the preschool years, even though their knowledge of the meaning of compound nouns
appeared very early. In contrast with the previous study by Nicoladis (2003), the present study
further shows that children's comprehension exceeds their production level. Finally, it shows that
the 3-year-old children preferred to choose the head noun rather than choose the modifying noun
when they made a single-word response, suggesting that they know the subcategorization
function of compound nouns.
References
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Berman, Richard., and Clark, Eve. 1989. Learning to use compounds for contrast: Data from
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Clark, Eve., and Berman, Richard. 1984. Structure and use in the acquisition of word formation.
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Fabb, Nigel. 1998. Compounding. The handbook of morphology, eds. by Spencer Andrew &
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