Limits on the Agent-First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.     

The usefulness of the story recall test in patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease

ABSTRACT

Background: The story recall test (SRT) is one of the most reliable neuropsychological assessments for evaluating verbal memory function in order to distinguish between individuals with normal aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD). The SRT is analogous to the logical memory test in Wechsler Memory Scale-III, which has recently been developed and standardized to apply to older adults in Korea. The purpose of this study was to examine the usefulness of the SRT and its ability to discriminate between normal cognitive aging and patients with MCI or AD. Methods: One hundred and twelve patients with MCI, 97 patients with AD, and 53 healthy elderly adults participated in this study. The SRT was compared with the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), Korean version of the Mini Mental State Examination (K-MMSE), and the Korean version of the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (K-HVLT). Results: The SRT was well-correlated with the dementia rating scales and the K-HVLT. However, the sensitivity and specificity of the SRT was greatly influenced by the level of education of the subjects. Conclusions: The SRT is a sensitive measurement of verbal memory function that can be used in clinical settings to discriminate between normal memory functioning and the very early and moderate stages of AD in a Korean population. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the SRT is more appropriate for subjects with a high level of education rather than a low level of education to differentiate normal cognitive aging from MCI or AD.     

Relationship Patterns and Role of Religion in Elderly Couples with Chronic Illness

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to explore the various relationship patterns and the role religion plays as a coping resource for elderly couples in which at least one spouse has a chronic illness. Elderly couples were interviewed and also completed marital satisfaction and couple communication inventories. Five different relationship patterns emerged from the data: active couples, short-term caregivinjg couples, long-term caregiving couples, survival couples, and live-in caregiver couples. Various aspects of religion emerged as an important coping resource among the different relationship patterns. Ideas and questions for research and practice, generated by the study, are presented.     

Application of focusing‐oriented psychotherapy in dealing with issues of Asian immigrants: A single‐case study of a Korean immigrant in Japan

A single case study is presented of the successful application of focusing‐oriented therapy in the case of a Korean woman who migrated to Japan. The client had a host of problems related to the discrimination she faced from her own family and from Korean society for being female, as well as relationship and cultural difficulties in trying to adjust to married life in Japan. Through 10 sessions of focusing‐oriented therapy, the client was able to re‐examine her situation from a positive perspective and began to accept herself as a person, not necessarily as a woman or a Korean in Japan. Issues related to Korean women immigrants in Japan are explored and the related effectiveness of focusing‐oriented therapy for the particular population is discussed.     

Relationship between positive mental health and appreciation in Korean individuals

Appreciation is a key component of subjective well‐being and may contribute to positive mental health. Few studies have examined relationships between specific aspects of appreciation and the 3 dimensions of positive mental health, and thus, the aim of this study was to identify associations between aspects of appreciation and positive mental health. Appreciation and positive mental health were measured in 266 Korean university students (50% females) using the Appreciation Inventory and the Mental Health Continuum‐Short Form. The results obtained showed that Have Focus significantly predicted Emotional Well‐being; Have Focus and Loss/Adversity significantly predicted Social Well‐being and Have Focus, Expression and Nature/Daily Life significantly predicted Psychological Well‐being. The implications of results that might enable positive mental health to be enhanced are discussed.     

Children’s (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: Evidence for developing control in sentence processing

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults’ and 4- and 5-year-olds’ ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; however, in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure, whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence. The findings implicate a general cross-linguistic pattern for parsing development in which late-developing cognitive control abilities mediate the recovery from so-called “garden path” sentences. Children’s limited cognitive control prevents them from inhibiting misinterpretations even when the disambiguating evidence comes from highly informative verb information.     

Navigating Between Cultures: A New Paradigm for Korean American Cultural Identification

The author incorporates empirical methodology and cross-cultural psychology literature to propose a new paradigm for Korean American cultural identification. He explains cultural identification as a cultural process construct that has important bearing on how successfully or unsuccessfully minority persons may function in the U.S. The construct of bicultural orthogonal identification was applied toward the development of a bilingual 4-item Korean American Cultural Identification Scale (KACIA). A random sample of 80 from a larger national pool of 1,141 Korean Americans was used to develop the scale. Findings support the orthogonality of bicultural identifications and good validity and reliability for the KACIA. The author argues for complimentary dualism over conflicting dualism and the orientation of “both/and” over “either/or” as a strategy for doing pastoral practice and theology.Parts of this article appeared elsewhere in different versions and they are modified and used here with permission from the respective publishers (see Lee, 1994, 1995, 2004a).     

Caring-self and Women's Self-esteem: A Feminist's Reflection on Pastoral Care and Religious Education of Korean-American Women

After reviewing the notion of caring-self from a Korean feminist perspective, this paper argues that caring-self, in spite of its great contribution to pastoral care and education of women, is an essentialist notion based on Western individualism, one that excludes the experiences of men and women of nonwestern/communal cultures. Critically examining psychological literature of women's self-esteem and Korean self-esteem literature, I argue that to provide more appropriate pastoral care and education for Korean women, it is necessary to understand what and how their concept of the person is formed in a Korean communal context.

Ethnicity,Coping, and Distress Among Korean Americans,Filipino Americans,and Caucasian Americans

Abstract

The authors examined appraisal, coping, and distress among Korean American, Filipino American, and Caucasian American Protestants. No interaction effects emerged among ethnic groups, but there were significant ethnic main effects for appraisal and coping. Compared with the Caucasian Americans, both Asian American groups appraised stressors as more challenging, and the Korean Americans appraised them also as greater losses. Both Asian American groups reported using more strategies of accepting responsibility, religious coping, distancing, and escape-avoidance than the Caucasian Americans did; the Filipino Americans also reported more problem-solving strategies than the Caucasian Americans. For all participants, challenge appraisals predicted adaptive coping (problem solving and positive reappraisal) and less distress. Problem solving, seeking social support, and positive reappraisal predicted less distress; self-control, accepting responsibility, and escape-avoidance predicted greater distress. The authors stressed the value of assessing ethnicity in coping research.     

《周易》东传与古代朝鲜半岛阴阳说

中国古代儒家经籍《周易》于汉代时已东传至朝鲜半岛,并在其"三国"时被确立为国学教育体系中的重要学习内容。在儒学教育体制和科举"科经取士"制度的促动下,古代朝鲜半岛不仅全面、系统地吸纳了《周易》思想,李氏朝鲜时还形成了活跃的易学研究局面,建构了自身的易学体系,成为域外易学的重要组成部分。随着《周易》思想及易学研究在朝鲜半岛的不断深化,其阴阳说也逐步渗透至天文地理、政治思想与社会文化等领域中,最终对朝鲜半岛哲学思想的发展及民族思维的建构产生了深刻的影响。