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Abstract
Eighty-one Korean children were tested once a year across Grades 4, 5, and 6 on Korean phonological and morphological awareness, speeded-naming, Hangul word recognition, Hangul spelling, and English word reading. With age, gender, and Korean vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both phonological awareness and speeded-naming were uniquely associated with Korean spelling and English reading; this phonological awareness link was stronger for older children than younger ones. In contrast, the only unique predictor of Hangul reading was morphological awareness; morphological awareness also significantly predicted Hangul spelling but not English reading. Of interest, morphological awareness was more strongly associated with Korean literacy skills for younger as compared to older children. Girls outperformed boys on both Hangul measures, but the groups did not differ on English reading. Results support the idea of phonological transfer to reading in a second language and underscore the importance of morphological compounding awareness for early literacy development in Korean.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was partially supported by RGC grant 448608 from the Hong Kong government to Catherine McBride-Chang. We are grateful to Soon-Gil Park, Jee-Hyun Lee, Na-Young Park, Kyung-Mee Woo, and Kyung-Lim Kang for their assistance in data collection. We appreciate the research assistance of Yik Ting Choi and Sze Wing Kuo. We also thank the students of Hoegae Primary School in Masan, Korea, for their participation.
Notes
1Each syllable block has position regularity and is mostly transparent in pronunciation by following the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules of Korean. On the other hand, the reading of multisyllable words and phrases is often subject to phonological changes due to the morphophonemic writing convention and assimilation phenomena of the Korean language (CitationKim-Renaud, 1997).