Correlates of Korean Hangul Acquisition Among Kindergartners and Second Graders

Abstract

were administered tests of speed of processing and phonological-processing skills as well as a Korean Hangul reading test. Speed of processing tasks were significantly correlated with most of the reading-related tasks but not with Hangul reading itself. Across studies, only tests of syllable and phoneme awareness (either onset or both onset and coda), as well as naming speed, were significantly associated with Korean word-reading. In both studies, in regression equations including all measured skills and age, only syllable and phoneme awareness uniquely predicted Hangul word rec-ognition. Results underscore the uniqueness of the Korean Hangul orthography, which requires children to be sensitive to both syllable- and phoneme-level linguistic and orthographic units. Because reading skill likely depends on a variety of environmental, linguistic, age-related, and script factors, researchers have become increasingly focused on specifics of reading acquisition across cultures (Harris & Hatano, 1999). In this study, we examined the relations of cognitive-linguistic skills to beginning Hangul reading in Korean to highlight the salient features of this script. The cognitive-lin-guistic skills tested included measures of phonological awareness at the levels of both the syllable and the phoneme. In addition, we tested children's speed of pro-cessing and speeded naming abilities. The theoretical importance of each of these skills for beginning reading is reviewed following an initial introduction to the