Korean EFL Learners’ Perceptions and Uses of Count/Mass Nouns

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study explores Korean EFL learners’ perceptions of quantification and their grammatical sensitivity in the use of count/mass nouns. To investigate the perceptions of adult learners and young learners, it compared the perceptions of thirty children with those of thirty adults using a quantity judgment task. For the adult group, a grammaticality judgment task was additionally administered to investigate their actual use of count/mass nouns. The findings show that both the young and adult learners exhibit a consistent pattern in their perceptions of count/mass nouns giving support to the results obtained in studies which addressed the same topic with learners of different L1 and L2 backgrounds. In the grammaticality judgment task, the adult participants judged the grammaticality of count nouns and subject mass nouns appropriately. They showed a tendency to judge quantity based on numbers for the object mass nouns and the flexible nouns. These results imply that the adult participants’ use of count/mass nouns match their perceptions of count/mass distinction.

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