Title: Foundations of early literacy acquisition in Korean
Description: Despite advances in our understanding of phonological awareness and letter-name knowledge for literacy acquisition, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on English and a few other European languages (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). This is unfortunate because findings from English-speaking children may not generalize to children who speak a language that differs from English in oral language structure and orthographic transparency. Moreover, the majority of previous studies have been limited to either cross-sectional research designs or to the longitudinal assessment of skills' development using only two waves of data. In this dissertation, I fill this gap in the literature by using longitudinal data (the first two articles) as well as cross-sectional data (the third article) on young Korean children. In my first article, I examine the developmental trajectories of children's sensitivity to different phonological units. Specifically, I investigate the accessibility of the rime unit (e.g., segmenting cat into c-at ) as compared to that of the body unit (e.g., segmenting cat into ca-t ) for Korean children. In my second article, I investigate a potential linguistic basis for the emergence of phonological awareness in Korean. Then, in the final article, I examine the relationship between phonological awareness and letter-name knowledge, and their contribution to three literacy skills (i.e., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling) in Korean.

My research leads to three important findings. First, the trajectories describing the growth of Korean children's body awareness over time were different from those for rime awareness; the body awareness trajectory had a higher initial level and grew at a more rapid rate than the rime awareness trajectory. Second, Korean children's body awareness may emerge out of their sensitivity to phonotactic characteristics in Korean. Finally, unlike the findings of studies of children speaking English, children's letter-name knowledge had larger impact on their literacy skills in Korean than did their phonological awareness, perhaps due to more consistent phonological patterning of letter names and the transparent letter-name and letter-sound relationship in Korean. Furthermore, Korean children's phonological awareness, and their body awareness in particular, has a statistically significant positive association with their letter-name knowledge.
Subjects: Literacy, Korean language, Phonetics
Places: Korea (South)