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 maps first noun onto agent role, is 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 number of overt arguments presence case-marking in Korean, an SOV language by dedicated markers. To investigate whether these affect operation we measure transitive construction (with scrambling omission sentential components) novel experimental setting where case markers were obscured varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find children do not demonstrate agent-first interpretation strongly noun–verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about thematic role nominal when it both only argument sentence lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better patterns additional cues, impact asymmetric age nature alignment between from word order These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking construction, activated properly conjunction other types interpretive cues.