Does children's knowledge of the sound structure of their language influence their literacy acquisition of literacy? Do children group sounds in a particular way? How is this related to children's literacy skills? Previous studies have shown that children speaking English and some Indo-European languages tend to divide a syllable into two smaller units, for example, cat into 'c' and 'at'. Furthermore, children's ability to manipulate these units (called phonological awareness) is related to their literacy skills. However, a question remains regarding whether this phenomenon is universal across languages with very different phonological characteristics. For example, do monolingual Korean children divide a syllable into similar or different chunks? Does Korean children's knowledge of syllable structure have any relationship to the development of their literacy skills in Korean? In order to address these questions, Ms. Young-Suk Kim, under the direction of Dr. Catherine Snow, will follow four-year-old monolingual Korean children from the beginning of their first preschool year to the beginning of their second preschool year. The study will use latent growth modeling in order to examine the development of the children's understanding of the phonological structure of Korean and their literacy skills.
The intellectual merit of the study derives from its capacity to expand researchers' conceptualization of children's phonological awareness development, which is at present based mostly on findings from Indo-European languages. A broader impact of this study is an increase in researchers' understanding of typological variation in the relationship between oral language features and children's development of phonological awareness. In addition, the findings will provide insights into how Korean preschoolers develop the control over their phonological system needed for success with the Korean alphabetic writing system.
