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

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.
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