Phonological awareness and literacy skills in Korean: An examination of the unique role of body-coda units

This study examines a salient intrasyllabic phonological unit in Korean, the body-coda unit, its role in literacy skills in Korean, and a possible source of the salience of body-coda units in the spoken language. Data were collected from Korean-speaking, monolingual beginning readers (41 kindergarteners, 40 first graders). The results indicate that body-coda boundary (e.g., ca-t) is more salient than onset– rime boundary (e.g., c-at) for Korean children and show that children’s body-coda awareness is an important predictor of word decoding and spelling in Korean. Furthermore, the analysis of phonological neighbors and frequency of syllable types suggests that a phonotactic feature in Korean, the frequency of consonant–verb syllable type, may be a possible source of the saliency of the body-coda intrasyllabic division for Korean children. Many have argued that achieving phonological awareness (PA), which is the understanding that words are made of smaller sounds, is a critical skill in early reading achievement, perhaps even a prerequisite to successful reading acquisition in languages that have an alphabetic writing system. Numerous studies have established a strong relationship between PA and reading in English and other Indo-European languages (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005, for review) and emerging evidence confirms the relationship in Korean (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005). However, it is only recently that researchers have undertaken a systematic and empirical examination of the relationship between oral language characteristics and salient phonological units (Durgonoglu & Oney, 1999) and possible origins of saliency of various phonological units (De Cara & Goswami, 2003). In this paper, data on Korean, a language that is typologically different from IndoEuropean languages and that has a relatively transparent alphabetic orthography, are presented to identify the roles of different levels of PA in reading and spelling acquisition in Korean and a possible source of the salient phonological units in Korean. © 2007 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/07 $12.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 70 Kim: Phonological awareness and literacy skills in Korean SALIENT INTRASYLLABIC UNITS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO LITERACY ACQUISITION Children’s awareness of three phonological units (syllable, onset–rime, and phoneme) has been found to develop sequentially in English (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Stahl & Murray, 1994; Treiman, 1985, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). It is well established that the boundary between onset and rime is salient in English (Durgonoglu & Oney, 1999; Treiman, 1985, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). Onset is a syllable-initial consonant or a consonant cluster, while rime refers to the syllable-final vowel or vowel–consonant(s) sequence. Onset–rime manipulation requires segmentation or substitution of the onset and the rime. For example, in a one-syllable word, cat, the consonant /k/ is the onset, and subsequent vowel and consonant / / is the rime. The rime / / is further segmented as two phonemes / / and /t/. Many words in English are formed by replacing the onset (e.g., mat, hat, cat, and sat), and many language games and nursery rhymes segment onsets and rimes as units in English (Goswami, 2001). Although many other Indo-European languages (i.e., Swedish, German, Norwegian, and Dutch) also show that onset–rime segmentation is salient, whether onset–rime is a salient intrasyllabic linguistic awareness across languages has been questioned only recently. Indeed, some evidence has indicated that onset– rime analysis may not be universal (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In particular, studies with Korean monolingual adults suggested that in Korean onset–rime (consonant–vowel–consonant [C-VC], e.g., g-ong) is not as salient as the bodycoda subsyllabic structure (CV-C, e.g., go-ng; Derwing, Yoon, & Cho, 1993; Yi, 1998; Yoon, Bolger, Kwon, & Perfetti, 2002; Yoon & Derwing, 2001). Korean speakers showed a tendency to link vowels with the preceding rather than with the following consonant, indicating a preference for the body-coda analysis over the onset–rime structure. Figure 1 illustrates the proposed intrasyllabic structures of English versus Korean. In English, both rime awareness and phoneme awareness have received much attention for their contributions to reading and spelling (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993; Dixon, Stuart, & Masterson, 2002; Goswami, 1991; Goswami & Mead, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). In particular, children’s rhyming ability contributes directly and indirectly to reading and spelling development in English even after controlling for phoneme awareness Figure 1. The proposed subsyllabic structure for English versus Korean. Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 71 Kim: Phonological awareness and literacy skills in Korean (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). Beginning readers are aware of the relationship between rime and its correspondent spelling patterns, and use this knowledge to infer the pronunciation of novel words (Goswami, 1986). The significant relationship of the rime awareness to literacy acquisition in English is explained by the statistical properties of the English orthography (Goswami, Gombert, & Barrera, 1998). In English, the stable sound–spelling relationships in the rime unit help beginning readers become sensitive to onset–rime parsing in word reading as they make a connection between English phonology and orthography. In English, the spelling–sound relationship is the most consistent in onsets, followed by codas and rimes, and the most inconsistent in nucleus (vowels; Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995). Goswami and colleagues (1998) suggested that the variations in the path to reading acquisition across orthographies can be explained by these statistical properties of different orthographies. A few studies that have examined the role of different phonological units in literacy development in languages other than English suggest that the predictive power of different phonological units may vary across languages. For example, rime awareness did not have as much predictive power as phonemic awareness in word reading in Norwegian and Swedish (Hoien, Lundberg, Stanovich, & Bjaalid, 1995; Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980). Furthermore, syllable awareness was shown to play a significant role in orthographically transparent languages such as Greek, Portuguese, and Norwegian (Aidinis & Nunes, 2001; Hoien et al., 1995). In Korean, Cho and McBride-Chang (2005) showed that Korean kindergarteners’ and second graders’ syllable and phoneme awareness predicted their real word reading skills. Furthermore, Yoon et al. (2002) showed that Korean children may use an analogy of the body unit in reading nonwords. However, questions still remain about how different levels of PA in Korean are related to different measures of literacy skills (e.g., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling) when they are examined simultaneously. The present study addressed these questions. UNDERSTANDING THE SOURCE OF EMERGENCE OF PA Despite the critical importance of the PA in literacy development, our understanding of linguistic and cognitive bases on the source of PA is limited (McBrideChang, 1995; Metsala & Walley, 1998). Lexical restructuring theory (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley, Metasala, & Garlock, 2003) proposes that children’s phonological representation grows with vocabulary acquisition. As children are exposed to and acquire words, they implicitly compare words phonologically and recognize that sets of words share such phonological units as syllables, onsets, and rimes. One mechanism through which this operates is that children recognize similarity of sound units when they know many similar sounding words. These are called phonological neighbors, which are, by conventional definition in speech recognition models, words that differ by addition, deletion, and substitution of one phoneme (Goswami, 2001; Storkel, 2004). However, De Cara and Goswami (2002) expanded the definition to include consonant clusters in the onset and coda as a unit. In this alternative definition, words that share sounds in the rime but differ in the onset by more than one phoneme are classified as phonological neighbors. Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 72 Kim: Phonological awareness and literacy skills in Korean For example, for the word cat, both mat and flat are rime neighbors, cap and catch are body neighbors, and kit is a consonant neighbor. Using this definition, it was demonstrated that in English many monosyllabic words have phonological neighbors in the rime unit, particularly, in dense neighborhoods (De Cara & Goswami, 2002) and this finding was extended to German, Dutch, and French (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Furthermore, De Cara and Goswami (2002) postulated that words with many similar sounds (or words in a dense neighborhood, e.g., hat, which has 45 neighbors) become more easily restructured. In fact, it was shown that the overrepresentation of rime neighbors in dense neighborhoods in English would pressure rime-level restructuring as children’s vocabulary grows (De Cara & Goswami, 2003). Then, according to De Cara and Goswami’s (2002) hypothesis, the saliency of the body-coda unit in Korean entails that many phonological neighbors should be found in the body-coda unit in Korean. For example, it predicts that the Korean corpus would have many phonological neighbors such as /pan/, /pat/, /pak/, /pal/, /pam/, /paN/, /pap/ [ , , , , , , ] compared to /kan/, /nan/, /tan/, /man/, /pan/, /san/, /can/, /phan/, and /han/ [ , , , , , , , , ]. Another proposal for different intrasyllabic segmentation across languages is the frequency of a certain syllable type. Share and Blum (2005) suggested that the frequency of the CV syllable in Hebrew may explain the saliency of the body-coda in PA tasks among Hebrew-speaking prereaders. However, no studies so far have examined these two hypotheses in explaining different patterns of emergence of PA in a language. The present study examined both phonological neighbors and frequency of different syllable types in Korean. Specifically, the study examined the predominance of body versus rime neighbors using monosyllabic Korean words. In addition, it investigated the role of phonotactic characteristics in Korean as a potential source of a salient intrasyllabic level of PA. PHONOLOGICAL AND ORTHOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE