Morphological Awareness, Phonological Awareness, and Literacy Development in Korean and English: A 2-Year Longitudinal Study

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Morphological Awareness,Phonological Awareness,and Literacy Development inKorean and English: A 2-YearLongitudinal StudyJeung-Ryeul Cho a , Ming Ming Chiu b & CatherineMcBride-Chang ca Kyungnam Universityb SUNY–Buffaloc The Chinese University of Hong KongPublished online: 15 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Jeung-Ryeul Cho , Ming Ming Chiu & Catherine McBride-Chang(2011) Morphological Awareness, Phonological Awareness, and Literacy Developmentin Korean and English: A 2-Year Longitudinal Study, Scientific Studies of Reading, 15:5,383-408, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2010.487143

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SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 15(5), 383–408Copyright © 2011 Society for the Scientific Study of ReadingISSN: 1088-8438 print / 1532-799X onlineDOI: 10.1080/10888438.2010.487143

Morphological Awareness, PhonologicalAwareness, and Literacy Development

in Korean and English: A 2-YearLongitudinal Study

Jeung-Ryeul ChoKyungnam University

Ming Ming ChiuSUNY–Buffalo

Catherine McBride-ChangThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

Eighty-one Korean children were tested once a year across Grades 4, 5, and 6on Korean phonological and morphological awareness, speeded-naming, Hangulword recognition, Hangul spelling, and English word reading. With age, gender, andKorean vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both phonological awarenessand speeded-naming were uniquely associated with Korean spelling and Englishreading; this phonological awareness link was stronger for older children thanyounger ones. In contrast, the only unique predictor of Hangul reading was mor-phological awareness; morphological awareness also significantly predicted Hangulspelling but not English reading. Of interest, morphological awareness was morestrongly associated with Korean literacy skills for younger as compared to olderchildren. Girls outperformed boys on both Hangul measures, but the groups didnot differ on English reading. Results support the idea of phonological transferto reading in a second language and underscore the importance of morphologicalcompounding awareness for early literacy development in Korean.

Correspondence should be sent to Jeung-Ryeul Cho, Division of Psychology and Sociology,Kyungnam University, Changwon, 631-701, South Korea. E-mail: [email protected]

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384 CHO, CHIU, MCBRIDE-CHANG

A growing number of studies on literacy development have considered phonolog-ical awareness and morphological awareness as two major cognitive constructs toexplain reading skills across diverse languages (e.g., Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Kuo& Anderson, 2006; McBride-Chang, 2004). However, their relative contributionsto reading and spelling development likely differ depending on the writing sys-tems and the ages of the participants. Korean is an interesting orthography to studyin this regard because its language and writing systems have relatively transparentphonological and morphological structures from a mixture of native Korean andChinese influences. In the present study, we examined the unique contributions ofKorean phonological and morphological awareness, along with speeded namingskills, to reading and spelling of Korean as a first language (L1) among upperprimary school children from fourth to sixth grade in a 2-year longitudinal study.In addition, we tested how phonological and morphological awareness skills inKorean explain development of reading of English as a second language (L2)among Korean children. In the following sections, we outline the basics of Hanguland how it, as well as English as a foreign language, is taught in Korean schools.We then consider the theoretical importance of both phonological awareness andmorphological awareness for reading in Korean and English.

HANGUL

Hangul is an orthography consisting of an alphabet with 14 basic conso-nants ( ) and 10 basic vowels

( ). Each Hangul letter represents a sound, andgrapheme–phoneme connections are relatively consistent. For example, conso-nants and make the sounds /g/ and /m/, respectively, and one of thevowels, , makes the /o/ sound. Many Korean phonemes are similar to corre-sponding English phonemes (e.g., /g/, /m/, /b/), though some English phonemesare nonexistent in Korean (e.g., /f/, /v/, and /th/). Although it is an alphabet,in Hangul, two or more letters are grouped in a square syllable block (e.g.,/gom/ meaning a bear; /mok/ meaning a neck). There are clear syllableboundaries within words due to this separated syllable block arrangement. Forexample, Hangul is written as in Korean, rather than appearing as a lineararrangement, as in Roman script (where it would have been written instead as

). Letters are arranged in order from top to bottom or from left toright within a syllable block. The location of a letter (left-right, top-bottom) inthe syllable block matches the position of the sound within the spoken syllable.1

1Each syllable block has position regularity and is mostly transparent in pronunciation by fol-lowing the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules of Korean. On the other hand, the reading ofmultisyllable words and phrases is often subject to phonological changes due to the morphophonemicwriting convention and assimilation phenomena of the Korean language (Kim-Renaud, 1997).

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LITERACY DEVELOPMENT IN KOREAN AND ENGLISH 385

For example, the first sound in the syllable is always in the left or top position.The syllabic structure of Korean is relatively simple compared to English: Mostsyllables are of a CVC or CV structure, and consonant clusters never occur at thesyllable onset. Because the syllable block represents both phonemes and syllablessimultaneously, Hangul script is called an alphasyllabary (Taylor & Taylor, 1995).

Most Korean words (either Chinese-loan or native) consist of multiple mor-phemes (Taylor & Taylor, 1995). The agglutinative process is used to combinemorphemes in Korean words. In Korean, morphology, involving compounding,derivational, and inflectional morphology, is rich and productive. An example ofa Korean derivational word is the noun /gi.pi/ meaning depth, which isformed by adding a derivational noun suffix /i/ to an adjective stem /gip/

meaning deep. Korean verbs have many different inflectional affixes as well. Forexample, a verb /ga.da/ (go) can be conjugated in many different formssuch as /ga.ni/ (since one is going), /ga.do/ (though one goes),/gat.ta/ (went), /da.get.ta/ (will go) and /ga.rha/ (go!). However,only compounds and derivations are considered complex words, because inflec-tions do not contribute to making new words in Korean (Zho et al., 2003). Ofinterest, many lexical compounds are relatively semantically transparent and com-mon. For instance, many country names such as /han.guk/ (Korea),/mi.guk/ (America), and /jung.guk/ (China) have the morpheme /guk/

(country) in the second syllable of the Chinese-loan words. As another example,the morpheme signaling the meaning of “neck” repeatedly occurs as the sec-ond morpheme in the Korean native words representing the meanings of wrist,ankle, and corner (e.g., corner is literally translated as street neck). Note thatChinese-loan words are Chinese words that were adopted into Korean more thana thousand years ago (see Taylor & Taylor, 1995, for a review). Although Koreannative words can be written only in Hangul, Chinese-loan words can be writtenin both Hangul and Hanja, a subset of Chinese characters. Koreans used Hanja astheir writing system before Hangul was created in the 15th century. Chinese-loanwords often refer to abstract concepts and technical terms, whereas native wordsare frequently used common words.

Korean words sometimes share a number of homophones. For example, thesyllable /guk/ represents more than seven morphemes, including (in Englishand Hanja, respectively), country ( ), office ( ), and chrysanthemum flower( ); /bae/ can have the meanings of stomach, pear, and ship. Thus, giventhe salience of lexical compounding and homophones in the Korean language andorthography, we focused on how morphological awareness in the forms of lexi-cal compounding and homophone sensitivity develops and contributes to Hangulreading and spelling growth among Korean children.

Korean children begin learning to read Hangul either in kindergarten or athome, before entering primary school. By age 6, most children have already mas-tered letter-sound mappings of the Korean alphabet and can read phonologically

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regular Hangul words quite well (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005a); they learn toread irregular words that are subject to phonological alternations of the Koreanlanguage caused by resyllabification, assimilation, palatalization, and others fromfirst grade. Most phonological changes in Korean occur in words and phrasesmade up of multiple syllables. Children learn complex vocabulary and Chinese-loan words, denoting abstract and technical concepts, in particular, when theystudy diverse school subjects during the middle elementary years. Korean chil-dren learn English as an L2 from the third grade on. Third graders begin learningoral English with greetings, phrases, and short sentences. The English alphabetand written English are introduced in fourth grade.

PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSING IN L1READING AND SPELLING

Phonological awareness includes the ability to discriminate and manipulate thesound units of spoken words such as syllables, subsyllabic units of rhymes,and phonemes. Phonological awareness is particularly important for reading andspelling in English and other alphabetic languages (see Ehri, Nunes, & Willows,2001, for a review). Phonological awareness is also associated with early read-ing acquisition of Hangul (Cho, McBride-Chang, & Park, 2008; Kim, 2007). Inaddition, measures of phonological awareness uniquely account for variabilityin Hangul word recognition among lower primary school children both con-currently and longitudinally (e.g., Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005a, 2005b). Thepresent study was among the first to test phonological awareness in relation toreading and spelling abilities of Korean upper elementary school students, par-ticularly longitudinally. The growth trajectories of word reading and spelling candiffer with development, though they rely on correlated mental processes (see,e.g., Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000, for a review).

Thus far, there has been little research on spelling skills in Korean. In this regu-lar orthography, the consistency of phoneme-grapheme correspondences is lowerthan the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, similar to patternsin other regular orthographies such as German. For example, Korean has the con-straint that only 7 consonant phonemes of 19 can occur in the final position in asyllable. In addition, the sound of /t/ in a coda is orthographically represented bysix different letters (e.g., ). Thus, spelling is relatively difficultas compared to reading in Korean. Nevertheless, across alphabetic orthographies,spelling requires phonological awareness skills to form and access multiple asso-ciations between the letters and sounds of words (e.g., Landerl & Wimmer, 2008).Thus, a strong association between phonological awareness and Hangul wordspelling was expected in the present study.

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Another aspect of phonological-processing research in relation to reading andspelling development is the role of speeded naming. Speeded naming is theability to name visual stimuli, such as letters, numbers, or pictures of commonobjects, quickly in time. Speeded naming likely taps a number of skills relevantfor reading success, including phonological access in lexical memory and non-phonological factors such as visual sequencing and symbol processing (Manis,Seidenberg, & Doi, 1999; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Wolf & Bowers, 1999).The relation between speeded naming and reading skills probably varies acrossorthographies and ages of participants. For example, in some studies, speedednaming contributes more strongly than does phonological awareness to reading,both in phonologically transparent orthographies such as German and Dutch, andin Chinese, a deep orthography (de Jong & van der Leij, 1999; Ho & Bryant, 1997;Landerl & Wimmer, 2008; Wimmer, Mayringer, & Landerl, 2000). However, onecross-linguistic study has suggested that different components of speeded naming,that is, articulation and pause time, may be more related to reading in transpar-ent and deep orthographies, respectively (Georgiou, Parrila, & Liao, 2008). Therole of speeded naming in early Hangul reading acquisition remains unclear, withearlier studies finding no association between speeded naming and Korean wordrecognition (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005a, 2005b), though a more recent studydid (Cho et al., 2008). The lack of consistency in existing findings and lack ofresearch on speeded naming in relation to reading and spelling in older Koreanchildren motivated further investigation in the current longitudinal study.

Apart from phonological-processing skills, morphological awareness is alsouniquely linked to children’s reading and writing skills across various languages,including Korean, English, and Chinese (Cho et al., 2008; Deacon, Wade-Woolley, & Kirby, 2007; Feldman, 1995; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; McBride-Chang, 2004). Morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize andmanipulate morphemes. The unique contribution of morphological awareness toreading in English and other alphabetic languages appears to increase with age asreading skill develops (Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; see Kuo & Anderson,2006, for a review; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Nagy, Berlinger, Abbott, Vaughan,& Vermeulen, 2003). Most of these studies in English and other alphabetic lan-guages have focused on derivational and inflectional morphology. In contrast,lexical compounding, a third dimension of morphology, was found to be criti-cal in reading of Korean and Chinese among kindergarten and elementary schoolchildren (Cho et al., 2008; Ku & Anderson, 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2005;McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat, & Wagner, 2003; Shu, McBride-Chang, Wu,& Liu, 2006).

In one cross-cultural study, Ku and Anderson (2003) found that morphologicalawareness of compounds and derivations develops with grade level and is stronglyrelated to reading ability in both English and Chinese. In their study, however, the

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amount of variance in reading Chinese explained by morphological awarenessdecreased with grade level, from 32% in second to 25% in fourth to 7% in sixthgraders in China, with vocabulary statistically controlled. In contrast, the variancein English word reading explained by morphological awareness did not appearto differ much by grade level—17% in second grade, 5% in fourth grade, and18% in sixth graders in America, respectively. Ku and Anderson did not addressthe question of possible different developmental patterns between Chinese andEnglish in this study. However, one possible explanation for these results is thatChinese children develop knowledge of compounding morphology that is preva-lent in the Chinese language from an early age and may actually be close tomastering it by sixth grade. On the other hand, American children may continueto develop knowledge of inflectional and derivational morphology through theirprimary school years and, indeed, well into secondary school (e.g., Adams, 1990;Anglin, 1993; Nagy, Berlinger, & Abbott, 2006). Thus, the importance of mor-phological awareness for reading may depend upon interactions among the agesof the participants, the orthography tested, and the ways in which morphologicalawareness is measured (e.g., derivational vs. lexical compounding morphology).

Korean is more similar to Chinese than to English in its compounding mor-phology. Similar to Chinese, in Korean, lexical compounding and homophonesare prevalent, and many Korean words consist of multiple morphemes (Taylor& Taylor, 1995). In one cross-cultural study testing second graders from Korea,China, and the United States, McBride-Chang et al. (2005) found that morpholog-ical awareness in the form of lexical compounding explained unique variance inword recognition in Hangul as well as in Chinese but not in English, underscoringthe importance of lexical compounding morphological awareness in Korean andChinese. In another study of Korean 4- and 5-year-olds (Cho et al., 2008), lexi-cal compounding morphological awareness was uniquely associated with readingof phonologically irregular Hangul words, with many other reading-related skillsstatistically controlled. Older Korean children commonly learn lexical compound-ing morphology explicitly when learning to read and write Chinese characters asan L2, though they learn meanings of words via a whole-word approach in earlykindergarten (e.g., Cho et al., 2008). Given these characteristics of the Koreanlanguage and teaching methods that emphasize lexical compounding, a strongassociation between morphological awareness and Hangul reading was expectedin the present study over 2 years.

The association of morphological awareness to Korean spelling was alsoof interest in the present study. Morphological awareness has been linked tochildren’s progress in the spelling of complex English words in a number ofstudies (Bryant & Nunes, 2004; Green et al., 2003; Kemp, 2006; Nagy et al.,2003; Nunes & Hatano, 2004). However, few studies have tested the relationshipbetween morphological awareness and spelling in Korean, particularly longitudi-nally. We expected that morphological awareness would be uniquely associated

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with Korean spelling over time because Korean spellings are morphophone-mic. That is, Korean spellings must maintain a certain syllable shape and keepmorphemes’ underlying representations together (Kim-Renaud, 1997). A deriva-tional example of morphology is that, , meaning depth, is pronounced as

/gi.pi/ meaning avoidance, due to the resyllabification phenomenon of theKorean language

PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSINGIN L2 READING

We also tested both our Korean phonological and morphological awareness mea-sures in relation to English reading growth across 2 years. Previous studieshave demonstrated that both L1 phonological awareness (Cisero & Royer, 1995;Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999; see Durgunoglu, 2002, for areview; Wang, Park, & Lee, 2006) and morphological awareness (Galambos &Goldin-Meadow, 1990; Geva, 1995; Wang, Cheng, & Chen, 2006) are uniquelyassociated with reading skills in an L2. However, few studies have exam-ined such associations across languages that differ considerably in orthography,such as Korean and English. Similarly, in relation to morphological awareness,most studies have demonstrated the transfer of morphosyntactic knowledge onlyacross languages such as English–Spanish (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990),English–French (Deacon et al., 2007), and English–Hebrew (Geva, 1995), wherethe two languages share a number of morphological and grammatical principles.

Based on a limited number of studies of correlations across dissimilar orthogra-phies (i.e., Korean–English and Chinese–English), we anticipated that Koreanphonological awareness would contribute uniquely to growth in English wordreading but that Korean morphological awareness might not. Wang et al. (2006)demonstrated that phoneme deletion and onset-rhyme detection in L1 Koreanwere significantly associated with phonological awareness in L2 English andexplained unique variance in English reading. Similarly, Cho and McBride-Chang(2005b) demonstrated that Korean phoneme awareness in second grade was longi-tudinally predictive of word recognition in English as an L2 in third grade. Thesefindings support the idea that phonological associations across languages are notrestricted to languages with similar structures (e.g., Chow, McBride-Chang, &Burgess, 2005; Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2001), and we expectedsimilar results in the present study. However, in relation to morphological aware-ness, only a few cross-sectional studies have tested for “transfer” across languagesrepresented by different scripts. For example, Wang, Cheng, et al. (2006) demon-strated that lexical compounding in L2 English contributed unique variance inreading to L1 Chinese among Chinese–English bilinguals, with Chinese oralvocabulary and phonological awareness statistically controlled. They interpreted

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this result as demonstrating transfer of a shared morphological structure (i.e.,forming compound words) between Chinese and English languages. However, inthat study, morphological awareness in L1 Chinese did not contribute to readingin L2 English. Thus, in the present study, we tested a similar association longitu-dinally from L1 Korean to L2 English in older children. In addition to this focuson phonological awareness and morphological awareness, the current study alsotested whether Korean speeded naming contributed to learning to read Englishlongitudinally, given that other studies have examined cross-linguistic associa-tions of speeded naming previously (e.g., Chow et al., 2005; Lindsey, Manis,& Bailey, 2003).

Admittedly, the present study did not offer a balanced examination of phono-logical or morphological transfer across languages as several other studies (e.g.,Comeau et al., 1999; Deacon et al., 2007) have done. This would have entailedtapping phonological awareness and morphological awareness in both Koreanand in English. Children’s initially very limited skills in English precluded suchan exploration, particularly for morphological awareness. Nevertheless, the issueof how L1 metalinguistic skills are associated with L2 reading acquisition skills isimportant, and our data offered us one way in which to explore L1 morphologicaland phonological awareness in relation to both L1 and L2 reading skills acrosstime.

To summarize, in the present study, we followed fourth-grade children intosixth grade to examine the extent to which phonological awareness, speedednaming, and morphological awareness skills in L1 Korean would predict read-ing and spelling of Hangul words and reading of English L2 words over 2 years.Although previous research has demonstrated that both phonological and mor-phological awareness were strongly associated with early Hangul reading (e.g.,Cho et al., 2008; McBride-Chang et al., 2005) similar associations have not yetbeen tested among Korean upper elementary school students. We hypothesizedthat morphological awareness would contribute more strongly than phonologi-cal awareness to Hangul reading in this study because phonological awarenesstends to be less strongly related to reading among older children in phonologi-cally transparent orthographies (e.g., Landerl & Wimmer, 2008; Wimmer et al.,2000) and because morphological awareness appears to strongly contribute toreading in orthographies that are relatively morphologically transparent, such asChinese (McBride-Chang et al., 2003; Shu et al ., 2006). However, both phonolog-ical awareness and morphological awareness were hypothesized to be importantfor Hangul word spelling, given the morphophonemic writing convention in theKorean language and the fact that spelling requires strong phonological awarenessskills in regular orthographies (e.g., Landerl & Wimmer, 2008). In addition, weexpected that Korean phonological awareness would be strongly associated withEnglish word reading but that Korean morphological awareness might not be.

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We also examined the extent to which age and gender, and their interactionswith phonological and morphological skills, would predict growth in reading andspelling in Hangul and English. Based on previous research on gender differencesin literacy across cultures (e.g., Chiu & McBride-Chang, 2006), we expected thatgirls would outscore boys in reading and spelling tasks. Morphological awarenessas measured in a lexical compounding task was predicted to decrease in asso-ciations with reading and spelling over time, given similar findings in Chinese(Ku & Anderson, 2003). However, the predicted associations of age in relation tophonological awareness and naming speed were unclear.

METHOD

Participants

Participating students included 38 girls and 43 boys from Korea who were initiallytested in June and July of 2005, when they were in fourth grade. They were sub-sequently followed up 1 and 2 years later in fifth and sixth grades. Seventy-nineof these students completed the tasks in fifth grade, and 73 students completedthe tasks in sixth grade. As noted next, both item response models and multilevelanalyses can deal with missing data.

All participants were native speakers of Korean from one public primaryschool. The mean age of students was 9.95 years at the first test. Participatingchildren had learned English from third grade on as a required class. They learnedoral English (primarily consisting of short phrases and sentences in third grade),and the English alphabet and word reading were introduced from fourth grade.English education in Korean primary schools focuses on increasing oral com-munication skills, emphasizing speaking and listening rather than reading andspelling (Ministry of Education & Human Resources, 2003). English was intro-duced to the participants for 40 min, 80 min, and 160 min per week in Grades 4,5, and 6, respectively. However, Korean children’s English reading skills varybecause many of them are taught to read English at home or in extracurric-ular classes after school (e.g., Korean Association of Child Studies & HansolEducation Research Center, 2002).

Procedure

Trained university students majoring in psychology tested the children in bothindividual and group sessions in a quiet room at their school. Each individualsession lasted approximately 1 to 1.5 hr for the testing of reading, phonologicalawareness, speeded naming, and vocabulary. Hangul spelling and morphological

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tasks were administered in a group session, lasting approximately 30 min. Thefollowing measures were administered.

Hangul word recognition. In the three testing times, children were giventhe same list of 50 Hangul words, of which 25 were two syllables and 25 werethree syllables. To increase difficulty level of the words presented, all words inthe list required the application of Korean phonological rules such as resyllab-ification, consonantal assimilation, palatalization, and others. The list included9 Chinese-loan words and 1 “mixed” word (i.e., a combination of Chinese-loanand native); the remaining stimuli were 40 Korean native words. These 40 nativewords included 16 compound words, 1 derived word, and 4 words making useof both compounding and derived morphology. The words were presented ingraded lists. Children were asked to begin reading from the beginning of the test.Experimenters stopped testing when five consecutive items were failed. There wasno time limit for the testing. One point was awarded for every item correctly readaloud based on phonological rules in Korean. Internal consistency reliabilities ofthe items were .95, .93, and .90 in Grades 4, 5, and 6, respectively.

Hangul word spelling. This task was done in a group setting. Children wereorally presented multisyllable words and were asked to write the words in Hangulon a paper. At testing Time 1, a list of 25 items was presented to the children,and another list of 30 items, including 27 higher difficulty items for assessmentof older children, was given at testing Times 2 and 3. Three items were thesame across the two lists and served as anchor items for item response modeling(Baker & Kim, 2004). The list at Time 1 included 22 Korean native words and 3mixed words of Chinese-loan and native words, whereas the list at Times 2 and 3included 27 Korean native words and 3 mixed words. The list of stimuli at Time 1included 19 compounds and 3 derived words, whereas the list at Times 2 and 3included 24 compounds and 4 derived words. One point was given for every wordspelled orthographically correctly. Internal consistency reliabilities were .83, .83,and .85 in Grades 4, 5, and 6, respectively.

English word recognition. At each test, we administered the same list ofEnglish words. This list consisted of 40 English words that were selected fromEnglish textbooks found in Korean primary schools. The children were asked toread each word aloud, and every correct word was allotted 1 point. All items werereal words. The list included 3 derived words, 2 inflected words, and 5 compoundwords. Internal consistency reliabilities were .97, .98, and .97 in Grade 4, 5, and6, respectively. All test items are available from the first author upon request.

Korean vocabulary. To control for basic verbal ability, the Vocabulary sub-test of the Korean Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Kwak, Park, & Kim,

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2001) was administered in Korean at the three testing times. Items consisted ofobjects and concepts of increasing difficulty, and children were to explain themorally. Each answer was scored from 0 to 2 by referring to the standardized mark-ing scheme, and testing stopped when the child scored a 0 on four consecutiveitems. There were 25 items and the maximum score possible on the task was 50.Internal consistency reliabilities of this subtest were .70, .85, and .77 in Grades 4,5, and 6, respectively.

Korean number naming speed. At each testing time, we administered atask of speeded naming of numbers. This task consisted of the same five digitsarranged in different orders across five rows. For this task, children were askedto name all items displayed across all rows as quickly as possible. Two trialswere administered, and the average speed was used in further analyses. Becausethere were few naming errors on this task, naming errors were not included inour analyses. Test–retest reliabilities were .87, .79, and .92 in Grades 4, 5, and 6,respectively.

Korean phonological awareness. This task consisted of a combination ofsyllable, onset, and coda awareness items and was administered at the three test-ing times. There were 16 syllable items included (composed of 3- and 4-syllablenonwords) across testing times, with difficulty levels adjusted with time. Nineitems were constant across time and served as anchor items for item responsemodeling (Baker & Kim, 2004). In addition, 20 one-syllable nonwords with aCVC construction were included on this task across testing times, 10 each requir-ing deletion of the onset or coda of the syllable. Internal consistency reliabilitiesfor the combined phonological awareness task were .92, .89, and .81 in Grades 4,5, and 6, respectively.

Korean morphological awareness. This morpheme production task wasadministered in a group session at the three testing times. Children were orallypresented with a two-syllable Korean word (e.g., /hong.cha/ meaning redtea), where each syllable was a morpheme, and the meaning of a target mor-pheme (e.g., /cha/ meaning tea) was identified as “drinking tea” in thisexample. Children were then asked to produce and write two multisyllable wordsin Hangul including the target morpheme and its homophone. One word (e.g.,

/nok.cha/ meaning green tea) was supposed to include the target morpheme(e.g., /cha/ meaning tea) having the same meaning as in the word presented,whereas the other word (e.g., /ja.dong.cha/ meaning car) was to containa morpheme ( /cha/ meaning vehicle) that has a different meaning from itsoriginal meaning but shares the same syllable. This test was developed followingShu et al. (2006). Both morphemes have the same sound and spelling in Hangul.

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Each of the 30 items required two responses for a total of 60 answers. Internalconsistency reliabilities were .87, .87, and .85 in Grades 4, 5, and 6, respectively.In this task, we tried to minimize the possible confounding of children’s literacyskills with this measure due to writing out their answers to the questions; specif-ically, we used high-frequency, one-syllable words that were easy to spell. Forexample, 11 items were CV syllables and 19 were CVC syllables, consisting ofbasic consonants in all onset and coda positions and basic vowels in 26 of the 30syllables. The mean and median word frequencies were 523 and 178, respectively(range = 6–4,659; Lee et al., 1991). Thus, the percentage of spelling errors in thistask was very low (.14%). Spelling errors were ignored because they were not thefocus of this task.

Analysis

We computed estimates of students’ competencies on each test by modeling eachtest’s characteristics with factor analyses and item response models. Then, a mul-tivariate, multilevel analysis was used to model students’ Korean reading, Koreanspelling, and English reading competencies over the 2 years.

Test characteristics and student competences. We first identified whet-her the questions on each test reflected one underlying competence or multiplecompetences through factor analyses (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 2004). As older stu-dents likely have greater competence than younger students, students at older ageswere given some items of higher difficulty levels (as well as common anchoritems) to assess their competence via an item response (IR) model (Baker & Kim,2004). The IR model treats the overlapping tests as subtests of the full test with allitems and calibrates a scale based on the full test. Hence, we modeled students’competences and test characteristics with a two parameter logistic item responsemodel (2PL-IR; Baker & Kim, 2004). This 2PL-IR model accounts for the testquestion’s difficulty and precision for distinguishing among students with highervs. lower competence (discrimination strength). We also tested a 1-PL IRT model,identified the best-fitting model with Bayesian expected a posteriori estimationand log-likelihood difference chi-square tests, and then computed each student’scompetence (Bock & Mislevy, 1982; Kennedy, 2004; Mislevy & Bock, 1990).

Explanatory model. We simultaneously modeled students’ three IR-computed competences (Korean reading, Korean spelling, and English readingscores) over several years with a multivariate, multilevel analysis (Goldstein,1995; also known as hierarchical linear modeling [HLM; Bryk & Raudenbush,1992]).

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A multivariate, multilevel variance components model tested if the variancesat each level differed significantly. Then, we entered the control variables gen-der and age. Each set of predictors was tested for significance with a nestedhypothesis test (chi-square log likelihood; Kennedy, 2004). Next, we entered avector of student knowledge consisting of x variables: Korean vocabulary, numbernaming (inverted such that higher scores indicated better performance), Koreanphonological awareness, and Korean morphological awareness. Some of thesevariables might show moderation effects, so we used a random effects model(Goldstein, 1995). If the regression coefficient of an explanatory variable (e.g.,Korean phonological awareness) differs significantly, then a moderation effectmight exist with Girl, and we test this via an interaction variable with Girl. Wefurther test interactions of significant with Age.

We used a multilevel mediation test (Krull & MacKinnon, 2001). For signifi-cant mediators, we computed the proportional change, 1 – (b’/b), where b’ and bwere the regression coefficients of the explanatory variable, with and without themediator in the model, respectively.

An alpha level of .05 was used. Testing many hypotheses increases the like-lihood that at least one of them incorrectly rejects a null hypothesis (a falsesignificant result). To control for the false discovery rate, we used the two-stagelinear step-up procedure, which outperformed 13 other methods in computersimulations (Benjamini, Krieger & Yekutieli, 2006).

RESULTS

Summary Statistics

Summary statistics for each measure for each grade are displayed in Table 1.Correlations between phonological awareness and reading measures were sig-nificant, ranging from .39 to .42 in Hangul reading, from .46 to .55 in Hangulspelling, and from .36 to .43 in English reading (see Table 2). Similarly, correla-tions between morphological awareness and outcome measures ranged from .39to .62.

Furthermore, the 2-PL IR model fit each of these tests’ data better than did the1-PL IR model (see Table 1). English reading scores showed the most variance(40% of the total), followed by Korean reading (33% of the total) and Koreanspelling (27%; see Table 2’s correlation–variance–covariance matrix).

Explanatory model. The multilevel regression analyses included Models 0,1, 2, and 3.

Model 0 : Yity = β00y + eity + fi0y (No explanatory variables). (1)

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TAB

LE1

Sum

mar

yS

tatis

tics

and

IRT

Com

paris

onTe

sts

2PL

vs.1

PL

IRT

Vari

able

MSD

Min

Med

ian

Max

df�

LL

χ2

Kor

ean

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

73.8

819

.89

13.6

281

.06

90.3

049

132∗

∗∗4t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

63.0

924

.88

13.6

275

.98

87.4

15t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

77.3

515

.17

19.6

581

.83

89.7

66t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

79.0

816

.62

20.9

584

.99

90.3

0K

orea

nsp

ellin

g(t

rue

scor

e)73

.81

15.8

59.

1677

.06

92.0

351

141∗

∗∗4t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

spel

ling

(tru

esc

ore)

62.8

315

.20

9.16

68.1

190

.58

5th-

grad

eK

orea

nsp

ellin

g(t

rue

scor

e)78

.11

13.8

520

.63

83.4

990

.40

6th-

grad

eK

orea

nsp

ellin

g(t

rue

scor

e)80

.20

13.6

920

.80

85.6

292

.03

Eng

lish

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

52.5

333

.70

0.84

60.6

398

.55

3998

∗∗∗

4th-

grad

eE

nglis

hre

adin

g(t

rue

scor

e)32

.28

28.4

70.

8425

.46

94.0

65t

h-gr

ade

Eng

lish

read

ing

(tru

esc

ore)

53.6

530

.68

0.84

62.3

998

.55

6th-

grad

eE

nglis

hre

adin

g(t

rue

scor

e)74

.01

27.5

10.

8485

.62

98.5

5A

ge10

.88

0.88

8.71

10.8

912

.47

Gir

l0.

480.

500.

000.

001.

00K

orea

nvo

cabu

lary

(tru

esc

ore)

34.1

511

.44

14.9

935

.70

74.8

029

79∗∗

∗N

umbe

rna

min

g(i

nver

ted)

10.2

11.

845.

3210

.45

17.5

0K

orea

nph

onol

ogic

alaw

aren

ess

(tru

esc

ore)

74.8

816

.75

12.8

680

.50

94.3

442

124∗

∗∗K

orea

nm

orph

olog

ical

awar

enes

s(t

rue

scor

e)44

.92

13.2

10.

4043

.31

76.3

679

187∗

∗∗

Not

e.IR

T=

item

resp

onse

theo

ry;

2PL

=tw

opa

ram

eter

logi

stic

;1P

L=

one

para

met

erlo

gist

ic;

LLχ

2=

Log

Lik

elih

ood

Chi

-squ

ared

stat

istic

.

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TAB

LE2

Cor

rela

tions

,Var

ianc

es,a

ndC

ovar

ianc

esA

long

the

Low

erLe

ftTr

iang

le,D

iago

nal,

and

Upp

erR

ight

Tria

ngle

ofth

eM

atrix

Vari

able

12

34

56

78

910

1112

1314

1516

1718

1K

orea

nre

adin

ga1.

020.

600.

520.

260.

140.

250.

540.

190.

402

4th-

grad

eK

orea

nre

adin

ga1.

490.

590.

600.

530.

660.

650.

510.

630.

540.

010.

230.

350.

860.

370.

363

5th-

grad

eK

orea

nre

adin

ga0.

560.

730.

330.

420.

510.

480.

330.

350.

490.

010.

070.

240.

390.

310.

374

6th-

grad

eK

orea

nre

adin

ga0.

680.

530.

530.

290.

330.

340.

230.

260.

320.

030.

110.

080.

580.

120.

165

Kor

ean

spel

linga

0.65

0.84

0.71

0.33

0.11

0.31

0.64

0.23

0.45

64t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

spel

linga

0.57

0.64

0.51

0.59

0.55

0.54

0.40

0.45

0.43

0.00

0.10

0.29

0.73

0.29

0.23

75t

h-gr

ade

Kor

ean

spel

linga

0.65

0.71

0.54

0.86

0.71

0.67

0.43

0.54

0.57

−0.0

30.

110.

220.

450.

410.

478

6th-

grad

eK

orea

nsp

ellin

ga0.

630.

660.

550.

830.

950.

710.

450.

530.

55−0

.04

0.13

0.19

0.75

0.17

0.20

9E

nglis

hre

adin

ga0.

460.

691.

250.

050.

360.

760.

250.

490.

0510

4th-

grad

eE

nglis

hre

adin

ga0.

420.

390.

320.

530.

520.

530.

980.

820.

560.

060.

020.

220.

610.

270.

2711

5th-

grad

eE

nglis

hre

adin

ga0.

520.

410.

370.

600.

650.

630.

840.

980.

680.

020.

040.

230.

490.

370.

4712

6th-

grad

eE

nglis

hre

adin

ga0.

490.

640.

490.

620.

750.

730.

620.

760.

810.

040.

040.

200.

900.

160.

2213

Age

0.29

0.01

0.05

0.10

0.42

−0.0

1−0.

11−0

.14

0.49

0.18

0.06

0.13

0.76

0.00

0.20

0.30

0.06

0.27

14G

irl

0.27

0.37

0.15

0.30

0.25

0.26

0.27

0.31

0.09

0.04

0.07

0.09

0.00

0.25

−0.0

20.

090.

040.

0415

Kor

ean

voca

bula

rya

0.28

0.32

0.30

0.17

0.38

0.42

0.28

0.32

0.36

0.25

0.25

0.32

0.25

−0.0

40.

810.

390.

210.

2716

Num

ber

nam

ing

(inv

erte

d)0.

290.

350.

260.

460.

380.

470.

300.

510.

370.

300.

280.

580.

190.

100.

243.

360.

470.

3717

Kor

ean

phon

olog

ical

awar

enes

sa0.

230.

390.

420.

390.

310.

490.

550.

460.

280.

360.

430.

400.

090.

110.

300.

320.

630.

1518

Kor

ean

mor

phol

ogic

alaw

aren

essa

0.52

0.52

0.48

0.39

0.64

0.53

0.62

0.43

0.58

0.49

0.53

0.44

0.41

0.11

0.40

0.27

0.26

0.57

Not

e.B

old

num

bers

are

Var

ianc

es.

a Item

resp

onse

mod

eltr

uesc

ore.

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In this equation, β00y represents the grand mean intercept of Yity, of student i attime t for outcome variable y. The student- and time-level residuals are eity andfi0y.

Model 1: Yity = β00y + eity + fi0y + β10yGirli0y + β2iyAgeity (Demographics).(2)

Model 2: Yity = β00y + eity + fi0y + β10yGirli0y + β2iyAgeity

+ βxiyXity (All variables).(3)

Model 3: Yity = β00y + eity + fi0y + β10yGirli0y + β2iyAgeity

+ βxiyXity + βizyZity (Test interactions among variables).(4)

Each of the three outcomes showed significant differences both between stu-dents and across time for each student (see Table 3, Model 0 for each outcomevariable). For Korean reading scores, only 38% of the differences were betweenstudents, and 62% were across time within each student (showing substantial stu-dent learning). For Korean spelling scores, however, most of the differences werebetween students (52%) and only 48% were across time. English reading scoreswere similar, with 47% of its differences between students and 53% across time.

Korean reading. Students’ gender, age, and Korean morphological aware-ness were linked to Korean reading scores. Girls outscored boys in Korean reading(β = 0.55; see Table 3, Korean reading, Model 1). Furthermore, older studentsoutscored younger students (β = 0.39). Meanwhile, students with greater mor-phological awareness had higher Korean reading scores (β = 0.28; see Table 3,Korean reading, Model 2).

Morphological awareness mediated the link between age and Korean reading,whereas age moderated the link between morphological awareness and Koreanreading (see Table 3, Korean reading, Model 3). Controlling for morphologicalawareness reduced the size of the link of age to Korean reading by 33% (z score= 3.1, p = .002). Also, the Age × Korean Morphological Awareness interac-tion term’s negative regression coefficient showed that the associations betweenmorphological awareness and Korean reading were stronger for younger children.After adding this interaction term, phonological awareness was no longer signifi-cantly linked to Korean reading. Together, these explanatory variables accountedfor 38% of the Korean reading score variance (51% of the differences amongstudents and 30% of the differences across time).

Korean spelling. Students’ gender, age, morphological awareness, phono-logical awareness, and number naming speed were all significantly associated

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TAB

LE3

Sta

ndar

dize

dR

egre

ssio

nC

oeffi

cien

ts(W

ithS

tand

ard

Err

ors)

ofM

ultiv

aria

te,M

ultil

evel

Reg

ress

ion

Mod

elR

esul

ts(0

,1,2

,and

3)S

imul

tane

ousl

yP

redi

ctin

gK

orea

nR

eadi

ng,K

orea

nS

pelli

ng,a

ndE

nglis

hR

eadi

ng

Kor

ean

Rea

ding

Kor

ean

Spel

ling

Eng

lish

Rea

ding

Pre

dict

or0

12

30

12

30

12

3

Gir

l0.

55∗∗

0.45

∗∗∗

0.47

∗∗∗

0.45

∗∗0.

39∗∗

0.36

∗∗0.

230.

120.

09(0

.16)

(0.1

3)(0

.13)

(0.1

6)(0

.14)

(0.1

3)(0

.19)

(0.1

7)(0

.17)

Age

0.39

∗∗∗

0.25

∗∗∗

0.21

∗∗0.

53∗∗

∗0.

42∗∗

∗0.

39∗∗

∗0.

67∗∗

∗0.

62∗∗

∗0.

57∗∗

∗(0

.05)

(0.0

6)(0

.06)

(0.0

3)(0

.04)

(0.0

4)(0

.04)

(0.0

5)(0

.05)

Kor

ean

voca

bula

ry0.

000.

03−0

.03

0.02

−0.0

5−0

.02

(0.0

6)(0

.06)

(0.0

4)(0

.04)

(0.0

5)(0

.05)

Num

ber

nam

ing

0.03

0.05

0.04

0.05

∗0.

07∗

0.09

∗∗(i

nver

ted)

(0.0

3)(0

.03)

(0.0

2)(0

.02)

(0.0

3)(0

.03)

Kor

ean

PA0.

20∗

0.10

0.03

0.17

∗∗0.

28∗∗

∗0.

42∗∗

∗(0

.08)

(0.0

8)(0

.05)

(0.0

6)(0

.07)

(0.0

7)K

orea

nM

A0.

28∗∗

0.34

∗∗∗

0.24

∗∗∗

0.25

∗∗∗

0.07

0.05

(0.0

9)(0

.08)

(0.0

5)(0

.05)

(0.0

7)(0

.07)

Age

×M

A−0

.34∗

∗∗−0

.30∗

∗∗−0

.24∗

∗(0

.09)

(0.0

5)(0

.07)

Age

×PA

0.32

∗∗∗

0.26

∗∗∗

(0.0

5)(0

.07)

Age

×N

umbe

rna

min

g0.

07∗∗

∗(0

.02)

Exp

lain

edva

rian

ceat

each

leve

lSt

uden

t38

%6%

59%

51%

52%

2%17

%28

%47

%2%

15%

13%

Yea

r62

%23

%21

%30

%48

%69

%68

%74

%53

%64

%66

%73

%To

tal

16%

36%

38%

34%

42%

50%

35%

42%

45%

Not

e.M

odel

0ha

sno

expl

anat

ory

vari

able

s,an

dth

e“e

xpla

ined

vari

ance

”in

dica

tes

the

vari

ance

atea

chle

vel.

Mod

el1

incl

udes

dem

ogra

phic

vari

able

s.M

odel

2in

clud

esal

lsig

nific

antv

aria

bles

with

outi

nter

actio

ns.M

odel

3in

clud

esal

lsig

nific

antv

aria

bles

and

inte

ract

ions

.PA

=ph

onol

ogic

alaw

aren

ess;

MA

=m

orph

olog

ical

awar

enes

s.

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with Korean spelling scores. Girls outscored boys in Korean spelling (β = 0.45),and older students outscored younger students (β = 0.53; see Table 3, Koreanspelling, Model 1). Meanwhile, students with greater morphological aware-ness had higher Korean spelling scores (β = 0.24; see Table 3, Koreanspelling, Model 2).

Morphological awareness mediated the link between age and Korean spelling,whereas phonological awareness and morphological awareness both moderatedthe link between age and Korean spelling (see Table 3, Korean spelling, Model 3).Controlling for morphological awareness reduced the size of the link betweenage and Korean spelling by 22% (z score = 4.0, p < .001). Also, the Age ×Korean Phonological Awareness term’s positive coefficient shows that the linkbetween phonological awareness and Korean spelling scores was stronger forolder children. In contrast, the Age × Korean Morphological Awareness term’snegative coefficient shows that the association between morphological aware-ness and Korean spelling score was stronger for younger children. These twointeraction terms showed cooperative suppression (Kennedy, 2004) with numbernaming speed and phonological awareness, both of which were positively linkedto Korean spelling. Together, these explanatory variables accounted for 52% ofthe Korean spelling score variance (28% of the student differences and 74% ofthe differences across time).

English reading. Students’ age, Korean number naming speed, Koreanphonological awareness, and Korean morphological awareness were linked toEnglish reading scores. Older students outscored younger students (β = 0.67; seeTable 3, English reading, Model 1). Meanwhile, students with faster Korean num-ber naming speed or greater Korean phonological awareness had higher Englishreading scores (β = 0.07; β = 0.28; respectively; see Table 3, English reading,Model 2).

Age moderated the links to English reading for number naming speed, phono-logical awareness, and morphological awareness (see Table 3, English reading,Model 3). The Age × Number Naming and Age × Korean PhonologicalAwareness terms’ positive coefficients show that the associations of Koreannumber naming speed and Korean phonological awareness with English read-ing scores were stronger for older children. In contrast, the Age × KoreanMorphological Awareness term’s negative coefficient shows that Korean morpho-logical awareness was positively linked to English reading scores for youngerchildren but negatively linked to English reading scores for older children.This suggests that Korean morphological knowledge supports young children’sEnglish reading but has an opposite association with older children’s Englishreading. Together, these explanatory variables accounted for 47% of the Englishreading score variance (13% of the student differences and 73% of the differencesacross time). Other variables and interactions were not significant.

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DISCUSSION

The present study introduced three new findings on the development of Koreanphonological processing and morphological awareness in relation to word recog-nition and spelling in Korean and word reading in English among childrenfollowed from fourth to sixth grade. First, morphological awareness was sig-nificantly linked to both reading and spelling of Hangul words, but not toEnglish word reading. Of interest, morphological awareness was more stronglylinked to Korean literacy skills for younger than for older children in this sam-ple. Second, although phonological awareness was not significantly associatedwith Hangul word recognition development, it was significantly associated withHangul spelling and English word reading, with stronger links for older children.Similarly, speeded naming was significantly associated with growth of Hangulspelling and English word reading but not Hangul word recognition. Third, girlshad stronger Korean literacy skills compared to boys, but English reading skilldid not differ significantly across gender.

Our findings suggest that morphological awareness is important for readingin Korean as in other languages (Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Deacon et al., 2007;Feldman, 1995; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; for a review,Nagy et al., 2003). In particular, these findings are in line with those from Ku andAnderson’s (2003) cross-sectional study of Chinese children in relation to mor-phological awareness, in which the association of morphological awareness toword reading was smaller among sixth graders than it was for fourth- or second-grade readers of Chinese in a cross-sectional study. Given some similarities inmorphological awareness and word reading between Chinese and Korean, it isinteresting to note that we found the same pattern in our longitudinal sample.Korean children develop knowledge of compounding morphology from 4 and5 years old (e.g., Cho et al., 2008). Thus, lexical compounding skill may berelatively well learned by sixth grade in Korea, so that its importance for read-ing is diminished. Admittedly, the sixth graders were not yet at ceiling on ourown morphological awareness task. However, in practice, the amount and typeof lexical compounding they do, particularly in relation to what is necessaryto improve reading, might be fairly developed by this age. This developmentalpattern is not similar to previous findings on English-speaking children usingEnglish derivational and inflectional morphology. Such studies have, rather, gen-erally showed that the contribution of morphological awareness to word reading inEnglish increases with age (e.g., Kuo & Anderson, 2006, for a review). Althoughpreliminary, the current study suggests that the developmental associations ofmorphological awareness and reading differ depending on the writing system andtype of morphology measured.

The developmental pattern in the present study between morphologicalawareness and reading with grade level may have been influenced both by

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characteristics of the Korean language and by teaching instruction. Korean chil-dren may develop compounding rules from an early age due to the prevalence ofcompounding in Korean native and Chinese-loan words. Compounds are transpar-ent and common in Korean. For example, one study reported that 80% and 68% ofnew Korean words created between 1995 and 2000, respectively, were compoundwords (Lim, 2002). Korean parents and teachers tend to teach their children under-lying meanings of syllables in compound words such as Chinese-loan words froman early age. In addition, many Korean children are taught to learn Chinese char-acters as an elective subject in primary school; in contrast, they are required tolearn Chinese characters as a subject beginning in secondary school. Such classesmay also highlight the importance of lexical compounding in Korean, a phe-nomenon that might be interesting to explore in relation to orthographic “transfer”in future work.

Ours is among the first studies to demonstrate a similar developmental pat-tern for spelling in relation to morphological awareness in Korean as has beenpreviously shown for morphological awareness and Chinese word recognitionas well (Ku & Anderson, 2003). Younger children tended to benefit more inspelling skills if they had relatively strong morphological awareness, whereasolder children tended to show more limited benefits of this awareness in thepresent study. Overall, these findings are in line with a growing literature onthe importance of morphological awareness in the form of lexical compound-ing for Korean literacy skills, at least through primary school (e.g., Cho et al.,2008; McBride-Chang et al., 2005). The present findings along with those fromKu and Anderson’s (2003) work on Chinese students also suggest that a focuson morphological awareness using lexical compounding may be most benefi-cial for promoting Hangul reading and writing skills among younger children.However, to demonstrate a causal association between morphological awarenessand stronger Korean literacy skills, future work should test the extent to whichinterventions that highlight lexical compounding for children, either by teachersin the schools or by parents at home, can facilitate improved word recognition anddictation skills among Korean children.

In contrast to these findings on morphological awareness, phonological aware-ness was not associated with word reading in Korean in the present study. Giventhe regularity of Hangul, this result was not surprising. Children make very fewerrors of phonology in reading Korean by late primary school, so the impor-tance of phonological awareness for Hangul word recognition is negligible. Atthe same time, however, phonological awareness actually increased in importancefor spelling among older children in the present study. This demonstrates thatphonological sensitivity can strongly facilitate spelling in a regular orthographysuch as Hangul. Landerl and Wimmer (2008) have demonstrated similar effectsfor German, another regular orthography.

Of interest, in the present study, speeded naming, arguably another measure ofphonological processing, was also significantly associated with spelling but not

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word recognition in Korean. Perhaps spelling skills show more variability in rela-tion to automaticity than do word recognition skills in Hangul, and this accountsfor the differences in associations of speeded naming for reading versus spelling.Indeed, similar results have been shown in some studies of upper primary schoolstudents learning to read and spell in English. In this work (Savage et al., 2005;Savage, Pillay, & Melidona, 2008), alphanumeric RAN skills were consistentlystrong correlates of spelling but not word reading. The authors argued that suchresults might be interpreted as indicating “preliminary evidence of a highly spe-cific RAN-spelling association” (Savage et al., 2008, p. 247).The orthographicspecificity of spelling may well demand knowledge of precise, and sometimessomewhat arbitrary, associations between print and oral referent, both in writingand in RAN tasks (e.g., Savage et al., 2008).

The results of a nonsignificant association of speeded naming to Hangul wordrecognition are similar to those obtained in previous studies of Korean in childrenin primary school (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005a, 2005b), though a more recentstudy (Cho et al., 2008) of preschoolers did find a unique association betweenspeeded naming and word reading. Although this pattern of results across stud-ies may be partly affected by the set of variables included in each study, it isalso possible that these findings represent something unique about Hangul. Thatis, it may be that the strong phonological regularity of Hangul along with itsclear morphological structure making strong use of lexical compounding rendersthe importance of speeded naming limited relative to some other orthographies,including English (e.g., Manis et al., 1999), strongly regular ones such as German(e.g., Landerl & Wimmer, 2008), and those with quite arbitrary sound-print asso-ciations, particularly Chinese (for a review, see McBride-Chang, 2004). Indeed,as suggested by a recent cross-linguistic study, different aspects of speeded nam-ing may be differently related to reading in diverse orthographies (Georgiou etal., 2008). It will be important to examine the underlying components of speedednaming in relation to Hangul reading in future work.

At the same time, however, both phonological awareness and speeded nam-ing were uniquely associated with word reading in English as an L2, and thisassociation was stronger for older children. The stronger association of the twowas phonological awareness with word reading, replicating previous bilingualand L2 learning studies demonstrating the importance of phonological aware-ness for reading L2 English (Cisero & Royer, 1995; Comeau et al., 1999;Durgonoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Gottardo et al., 2001; Lindsey etal., 2003). However, speeded naming showed a similar trend with English L2reading, suggesting that automaticity of phonological processing might be partic-ularly important as children persist in L2 word recognition development. Theseresults are an interesting contrast with the Hangul word reading results in whichneither phonological-processing variable proved significant. In addition, in con-trast to the strong associations of morphological awareness to both reading andspelling of Hangul, morphological awareness was not associated with English

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word recognition. This result might be attributable in part to the fact that mostEnglish words used in the present study were relatively simple, sometimes withoutany combinations of morphological features. Knowledge of Korean morphologymay not contribute to reading of simple English words. Likewise, in the study ofWang, Cheng, et al. (2006), morphological compounding awareness, which waswell developed among Chinese-speaking children, might have had a relativelylimited role in word recognition in English, which perhaps makes greater use ofinflectional and derivational, rather than compounding, knowledge. As expected,the association between Korean phonological-processing skills and English wordreading appears to be much stronger than between Korean morphological skillsand English reading.

The final result of interest in the present study was the strong gender differ-ences for Korean as compared to English literacy skills. Previous studies havedemonstrated clear advantages for girls as compared to boys in literacy skills inearly adolescence across most countries tested (e.g., Chiu & McBride-Chang,2006). However, few studies have examined gender differences in L2 literacyskills. Whether the novelty of English word reading for the children in the presentstudy made it difficult to detect gender differences that might eventually emergein L2 reading or whether English word reading involves different skills such thatthere truly are no gender differences in foreign language learning over time inKorean children remains to be seen. However, the distinction in findings betweengender and L1 and L2 literacy acquisition might be interesting to explore in futurereplications of this work across languages.

The present study could be critiqued for several aspects of design. First, thesample size across the years was relatively small in relation to the number ofvariables and interactions we included. Practically speaking, this issue is diffi-cult to overcome in a longitudinal study involving individual testing of children.Nevertheless, future research might include an even larger sample size initially.Second, there are some aspects of measurement in this study that might beimproved. In an ideal world, the items across measures administered at differ-ent grade levels would be identical, removing the necessity of an item responsemodel (Baker & Kim, 2004). At the same time, however, given the large differ-ences in literacy gains made by children of the grade levels included here, suchmeasurement might be time-consuming and impractical.

In addition, the morphological awareness measure was administered in a paper-and-pencil format. This meant that children had to write out their answers to themorphological awareness questions, possibly confounding their literacy knowl-edge with morphological measurement. However, we tried to minimize thisproblem by including only high-frequency words in the task and by ensuringthat spelling errors were not a focus of scoring in this task. Future studies mightconsider ways to improve measurement further on these tasks. Finally, phonolog-ical and morphological awareness were measured in Korean only in this study.

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This design could be improved with the inclusion of appropriate cross-languagecontrols, that is, phonological and morphological awareness in English as wellas Korean, to measure strict transfer from Korean to English reading. Similardesigns have been employed in previous work on other languages (e.g., Comeauet al., 1999; Deacon et al., 2007). However, because of the participating Koreanchildren’s relatively weak knowledge of English as beginners in the language,we felt that we could not practically include such cross-language controls in thepresent study.

Despite these limitations, however, the present study has demonstrated somenew theoretical aspects of literacy development in Korean. Perhaps most strik-ing, phonological awareness appears to be relatively strongly related to Hangulspelling but not to word recognition with age, whereas morphological awarenessis strongly related to literacy skills in both. This link between morphologicalawareness, measured using a lexical compounding task, and literacy skills isparticularly strong in younger children. In contrast, phonological awareness isimportant for L2 English word reading in Korean children, but morphologicalawareness in Korean is not. The link between speeded naming and word read-ing is evident in L2 English word learning but not for L1 Korean word reading.Modest unique effects of speeded naming and spelling in Korean were also noted.It is important to note that morphological awareness was a unique correlate ofreading and spelling in Korean, whereas phonological awareness is importantfor learning English as a second language. Practically, these results suggest thatdifferent types of interventions may be needed for Korean primary school chil-dren at risk for reading difficulties in Korean or English. For example, trainingof morphological compounding awareness might, theoretically, promote Hangulreading and spelling development for Korean children. On the other hand, a focuson Korean phonological-processing skills such as phonological awareness andspeeded naming might be useful to train in order to facilitate the learning ofEnglish word recognition among Korean children. Future training studies shouldexplore these possibilities. Finally, there tended to be strong gender differences,with girls outperforming boys, on both reading and spelling of Hangul but notfor English. These results add to the growing literature on reading developmentacross age, extending past research by demonstrating the importance of examininginteractions of age to reading-related skills.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was partially supported by RGC grant 448608 from the Hong Konggovernment to Catherine McBride-Chang. We are grateful to Soon-Gil Park, Jee-Hyun Lee, Na-Young Park, Kyung-Mee Woo, and Kyung-Lim Kang for theirassistance in data collection. We appreciate the research assistance of Yik Ting

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Choi and Sze Wing Kuo. We also thank the students of Hoegae Primary Schoolin Masan, Korea, for their participation.

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Documents

Morphological Awareness, Phonological Awareness, and Literacy Development in Korean and English: A 2-Year Longitudinal Study