Professor Kweon Soo-Ok of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences won the Best Paper Award in the Applied Linguistics Association of Korea (ALAK). ALAK held its “2009 Applied Linguistics Association Conference” in Chung-Ang University on Dec. 5 and presented the Best Paper Award to Prof. Kweon.

Prof. Kweon read a paper titled “Resolving PP(Prepositional Phrase) Attachment Ambiguity in Lexically Biased Constructions in L2 Sentence Processing”  in Applied Linguistics published by ALAK. This paper drew attention for the point that she used an on-line method introduced recently as an experimental way, and this research was rare in the areas which have adopted English as second language.

Prof. Kweon verified through three different sentence processing theories how Korean university students attempt to understand a sentence where a prepositional phrase has an ambiguous meaning. As a result, she found out that the ambiguity of a prepositional phrase is processed in a different way according to subcategorization of the verb.

Prof. Kweon, who received a doctoral degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, entered POSTECH in 2003 and has taken charge as the editing director of the Asia TEFL journal since 2006.