Hyoun-A Joo defends Ph.D. dissertation on the German spoken by Korean immigrants

On June 5th Hyoun-A Joo successfully defended her dissertation, titled “Clausal architecture in naturally acquired German: Korean immigrants in Germany.” The dissertation investigates the acquisition of the clausal structure of L2 German by Korean native speakers who emigrated to Germany for work purposes in the 1970s and have resided there since then. The results show that the development of L2 grammars by adults happens in stages, leading to possible missing abstract representations for lower proficient L2 speakers. Non-target-like utterances by more proficient speakers, on the other hand, are more likely due to computational difficulties in mapping abstract syntactic features to lexical items rather than to representational deficits.

Dr. Joo, pictured here with committee members (l. to r.) Carrie Jackson, Michael Putnam, and Richard Page, will begin a post-doc at Georgia Institute of Tehcnology in the Fall.

Congratulations, Hyoun-A!