This study examines the effect of language interaction in the target language community on indirect refusal and implied opinion comprehension. Participants were 43 intermediate Korean learners who were divided into two groups according to the amount of language interaction. They completed a pragmatic listening task measuring their ability to comprehend implied meaning.
The results were as follows. First, according to the frequency and time of language contact outside of class per week, there is a significant difference in pragmatic comprehension. Namely, it was shown that the group with greater language contact had a higher pragmatic comprehension ability than the group with less language contact. In addition. according to the frequency and time of language contact outside of class per week, there was a significant difference in each item type. In particular, it was shown that the group with greater language contact had higher comprehension of both indirect refusals and implied opinions than the group with less language contact outside of class. Second, from the analysis of each individual response, it was shown that indirect refusal comprehension was affected by refusal strategies, and implied opinion comprehension was affected by syntactic, lexical difficulty. (Yonsei University)