The Interplay of Probabilistic Expectation and Semantic Compatibility in Korean Evidential Processing

Abstract

This study examines how readers process evidential dependencies in Korean, a language where marking the source of information is morphologically encoded but often optional. Using a combination of offline and online measures, we investigated the extent to which readers adhere to evidential consistency during incremental processing. Our findings indicate that while readers generate probabilistic expectations based on early cues, these expectations are distinctly modulated by semantic compatibility. The observation that evidential mismatches are frequently accommodated suggests that evidentiality in Korean functions as a soft constraint to prevent communication breakdown. We conclude that evidential processing is not driven by rigid grammatical algorithms but is a flexible mechanism that balances probabilistic expectation with semantic congruence.