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The foundation of literacy skills in Korean: the relationship between letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness and their relative contribution to literacy skills

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Abstract

This study examined the relative contribution of letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness to literacy skills and the relationship between letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness, using data from Korean-speaking preschoolers. The results revealed that although both letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness made unique contributions to literacy skills (i.e., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling), letter-name knowledge played a more important role than phonological awareness in literacy acquisition in Korean. Letter-name knowledge explained appreciably greater amount of variance and had larger effect sizes in literacy skills. Furthermore, children with greater syllable, body (e.g., segmenting cat into ca-t), and phoneme awareness had higher levels of letter-name knowledge. In particular, children’s syllable awareness and body awareness were positively associated with their letter-name knowledge, even after controlling for children’s phoneme awareness. These results suggest that Korean children’s awareness of larger phonological units (i.e., syllable and body) in addition to phoneme awareness may mediate the relationship between letter-name knowledge and literacy acquisition in Korean, in contrast with previous findings in English that have demonstrated a positive relationship only between phoneme awareness and letter-name knowledge, and the hypothesis that phoneme awareness mediates the relationship between letter-name knowledge and literacy acquisition.

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Notes

  1. In English 24 of the 26 letters contain a speech phoneme of the sound value (Treiman & Kessler, 2003) while in Korean 35 of the 40 letters do. In Korean five double consonants do not contain the corresponding phoneme and they are named literally ‘double’-single consonant.

  2. Two exceptions are letters, /kɪ.jʌk/ and /tɪ.gɨt/, which have a CV.CVC structure.

  3. While the majority of letter names for consonants have /ɨ/ in the second syllable, two exceptions exist. One letter name has /jʌ/ (kɪjʌk) and the other has /o/ (∫ɪot).

  4. Phonemic contrasts of 19 consonants in the onset are neutralized to seven in the coda.

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Acknowledgements

Part of this study was supported by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant (#0545205) and Harvard Korea Institute’s Min Young-Chul Memorial Summer Travel Fellowship. The author wishes to thank all the children, teachers, and preschool directors who participated in this study. Special thanks are due to Jaesik Kim and Heesook Kim. In addition, the author wishes to thank Catherine Snow, John Willett, Andrew Nevins, and anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier version of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University, 227 N. Bronough St. Suite 7250, Tallahassee, FL, 32301, USA

    Young-Suk Kim

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Correspondence to Young-Suk Kim.

Appendices

Appendix A

Pilot sample means, standard deviations, and t statistics for testing differences in children’s performances on body awareness tasks with varied linguistic manipulations in the target word in the oddity tasks (n = 75)

Body awareness

Mean (SD)

Rime change

2.81 (1.22)

Onset coda change

2.37 (1.18)

Syllable change

2.40 (1.25)

In this study, syllable change condition was used in the body awareness task. In the pilot test, the linguistic characteristics of the target odd word (or distractors) were varied in the body awareness task in order to investigate whether its phonological characteristics influence children’s performance. The distractors varied in the following: (1) those requiring a rime change (i.e., the distractor shared the same onset as the other two words; e.g., puk, pul, pam), (2) those requiring an onset-coda change (i.e., the distractor shared the same vowel as the other two words; sam, p h an, p h al), and (3) those requiring a syllable change (i.e., the distractor did not share any sounds with the other two words; e.g., mal, puk, man). A total of 24 items (8 items in each linguistic structure for distractors) was used in the body awareness task. The order of items for each linguistic manipulation condition was randomly arranged.

As seen in the table above, in the body awareness tasks, children’s performance on the rime change distractor items was statistically significantly higher than on the onset-coda change distractor items (t = 3.65, p = .000) as well as on the syllable change distractor items (t = 3.32, p = .001), but there was no difference in children’s performance between onset-coda change distractor items and syllable change items. Thus, in this study, syllable change condition was used.

In addition, an attempt was made to examine the potential effect of global sound similarity in the distractors. In another study, a subsample of children (n = 63) were given another body awareness task in addition to the body awareness task with syllable change condition used in this study. In this task, the odd word (distractor) shared the same consonant sounds as one of the other two words and only differed in the vowel (e.g., kaŋ, kam, kim). In this case, the global sound similarity was controlled because two phonemes are shared in the two words that share the same sounds in the body unit (CV, /k/ and /a/ in the example) as well as in one of the two words and the distractor (CC, /k/ and /m/ in the example). Children’s performance on this task (m = 10.11) was not statistically different from their performance on the body awareness task in which the odd word had an entirely different syllable (m = 10.44) (F (1, 62) = .84, p = .36).

Appendix B

Korean alphabet letters and their names

Consonants

Vowels

Letter

Letter name

Letter

Letter name

ㄱ

kɪj∧k

ㅏ

a

ㄴ

nɪɨn

ㅑ

ja

ㄷ

tɪgɨt

ㅓ

∧

ㄹ

rɪɨl

ㅕ

j∧

ㅁ

mɪɨm

ㅗ

o

ㅂ

pɪɨp

ㅛ

jo

ㅅ

∫ɪot

ㅜ

u

ㅇ

ɪɨŋ

ㅠ

ju

ㅈ

cɪɨt

ㅡ

ɨ

ㅊ

t∫ɪ ɨt

ㅣ

ɪ

ㅋ

khɪɨk

ㅐ

æ

ㅌ

thɪɨt

ㅔ

æ

ㅍ

phɪɨp

ㅘ

wa

ㅎ

hɪɨt

ㅟ

wɪ

ㄲ

ssaŋkɪj∧k

ㅢ

ɨɪ

ㄸ

ssaŋtɪgɨt

ㅝ

w∧

ㅃ

ssaŋpɪɨp

ㅖ

jɛ

ㅆ

ssaŋ∫ɪot

ㅒ

jɛ

ㅉ

ssaŋcɪɨt

ㅚ

wɛ

  

ㅙ

wɛ

  

ㅞ

wɛ

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Kim, YS. The foundation of literacy skills in Korean: the relationship between letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness and their relative contribution to literacy skills. Read Writ 22, 907–931 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-008-9131-0

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