DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN KOREAN AND ENGLISH MONOLINGUAL CHILDREN AND IN KOREAN-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Abstract

The present study explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in talk-in-interaction of Korean-English bilingual children and their monolingual peers in two languages. The corpus-driven analysis proposes a core meaning of the two DMs as signaling contextual divergence in two monolingual groups. Both similarities and differences coexist in the bilingual data. While the core meaning of well was contextual divergence, that of isscanha was of the cognitive thinking process. The bilingual children utilized the first language DM as an additional resource for their own interactional purposes, such as for searching words and reasoning. The statistical analyses revealed that bilingual children used both DMs in a similar frequency to both monolingual groups. In both monolingual and bilingual data, age affected the use of well but gender did not, and neither age nor gender affected the use of isscanha. Bilingual children's use of the English DM had a correlation with the length of exposure to school context. In addition, awareness of socio-cultural factors in the use of Korean DM appeared differently from that of their monolingual peers. The study uncovered that bilingual children developed interactional competence through the use of DMs in various natural interactions.