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Soonja Choi

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Soonja Choi (Korean: 최순자) is a South Korean linguist. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean.

Education

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Choi initially studied French language and literature, receiving her BA at Sacred Heart Women's College in Seoul in 1972 and her MA at Seoul National University in 1976.[1][2] After this she went to study in France, and received a master's degree in applied linguistics from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) in 1980.[2] Her PhD in linguistics was awarded in 1986 by SUNY Buffalo.[2]

Career

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After her doctoral studies, Choi spent some time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada, before being appointed assistant professor at San Diego State University in 1987.[3] She remained at SDSU until her retirement, being promoted to associate professor in 1991 and full professor in 1997.[3] In 2008, she founded the Korean Studies Program at SDSU, and she remains its senior advisor.[4]

Choi has retained links with Europe throughout her career. From 1988 to 1996, she was active as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she collaborated with Melissa Bowerman.[3] Since 2012, she has also been Research Professor at the Comparative Psycholinguistics Group of the University of Vienna, Austria.[2][3] In 2019 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.[3]

Research

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Much of Choi's research has been concerned with the first language acquisition of spatial semantics, especially motion events and spatial categories, and the relationship between language and cognition more broadly. A recurring theme, especially in work with Melissa Bowerman, has been the extent to which these domains provide evidence for or against the hypothesis of linguistic relativity.[5] Her work has drawn on both naturalistic and experimental evidence, in particular building on comparative work on languages such as Korean, Dutch, English, French and German.[6] More recently, she has worked on evidentiality (linguistic coding of information source) and clause chaining construction in Korean.https://sites.google.com/view/soonja-choi-ph-d-sdsu/home

Selected publications

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  • Gopnik, Alison, and Soonja Choi. 1990. Do linguistic differences lead to cognitive differences? A cross-linguistic study of semantic and cognitive development. First Language 10, 199-215.
  • Choi, Soonja, and Melissa Bowerman. 1991. Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition 41, 83-121.
  • Choi, Soonja, and Alison Gopnik. 1995. Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22, 497-529.
  • Gopnik, Alison, and Soonja Choi. 1995. Names, relational words, and cognitive development in English and Korean speakers: nouns are not always learned before verbs. In Michael Tomasello and William E. Merriman (eds.), Beyond Names for Things: Young Children's Acquisition of Verbs, 63-80. New York: Erlbaum. ISBN 9781138876378
  • Choi, Soonja, Laraine McDonough, Melissa Bowerman, and Jean M. Mandler. 1999. Early sensitivity to language-specific spatial categories in English and Korean. Cognitive Development 14, 241-268.
  • Bowerman, Melissa, and Soonja Choi. 2001. Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In Melissa Bowerman and Stephen Levinson (eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521593588
  • Bowerman, Melissa, and Soonja Choi. 2003. Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, 387-427. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262571630
  • McDonough, Laraine, Soonja Choi, and Jean M. Mandler. 2003. Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults. Cognitive Psychology 46, 229-259.
  • Choi, Soonja. 2006. Influence of language-specific input on spatial cognition: Categories of containment. First Language, 26 (2), 207-232.
  • Choi, Soonja. 2011. Language-specificity of Motion event expressions in young Korean children. Language, Interaction & Acquisition, 2(1), 157-184.
  • Choi, Soonja, and Kate Hattrup. 2012. Relative contribution of cognition/perception and language on spatial categorization. Cognitive Science, 36, 102–129.
  • Yun, Hongoak, and Soonja Choi. 2018. Spatial semantics, cognition, and their interaction: A comparative study of spatial categorization in English and Korean. Cognitive Science, 42(6), 1736-1776.
  • Choi, Soonja, Florian Goller, Upyong Hong, Ulrich Ansorge, and Hongoak Yun. 2018. Figure and Ground in spatial language: Evidence from German and Korean. Language and Cognition, 10, 665-700.
  • Choi, Soonja. 2020. Development of clause-chaining in Korean. Frontiers of Psychology, 11:256. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00256
  • Choi, Soonja, Florian Goller, Ulrich Ansorge, Upyong Hong, and Hongoak Yun. 2022. Lexical expressions versus grammatical markers for source of information: A contrast between German and Korean. Language Sciences, 92.
  • Baier, Diane, Soonja Choi, Florian Goller, Yunju Nam, and Ulrich Ansorge. 2023. Does language determine perception? Testing a radical view of linguistic relativity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(3), 794-824. doi.org/10.1037/sge0001296

References

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  1. ↑ "Soonja Choi - Curriculum Vitae". Retrieved 1 November 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "SDSU: Soonja Choi, PhD". Retrieved 1 November 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Academia Europaea: Soonja Choi". Retrieved 1 November 2021.
  4. ↑ "SDSU Korean Studies Program". Retrieved 16 October 2025.
  5. ↑ Clark, Eve V. and Dan I. Slobin. Forward. In Ten Lectures on Language, Cognition, and Language Acquisition, Brill, 2018.
  6. ↑ "SDSU: Soonja Choi, PhD: Research". Retrieved 1 November 2021.
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