Honorific agreement in Korean: Retrieval processing and predictive processing

Lee, So Young and Myung Hye Yoo. 2023. Honorific agreement in Korean: Retrieval processing and predictive processing. Linguistic Research 40(3): 387-407. This study investigates the processing mechanisms of subject-verb agreement in Korean, which offers a distinctive landscape that encompasses both optional and required agreement components. We particularly focused on the attraction effect, by teasing a part of agreement relationships (optional vs. required). The findings in this study indicate that Korean honorific agreements might employ a distinct processing strategy, potentially resembling the active search strategy observed in other long-distance dependencies in Korean. Korean speakers appear to predict the presence of honorific markers for dependency resolution, even though honorific agreements are not obligatory in the language. This research provides new insights into the crosslinguistic variations in processing strategies for subject-verb agreement. (Miami University center dot National University of Singapore)