Cat in the hat or cat in the cap? An investigation of the developmental trajectories of phonological awareness for Korean children
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Abstract
This study investigated trajectories of Korean children's growth in the awareness of four phonological units –syllable, body, rime and phoneme– over time, by following a sample of 215 children over a period of 15 months, beginning at their first year of preschool and collecting four waves of data. Much of the existing research suggests that children who speak European languages tend to find subsyllabic phonological units, onset and rime, salient. In contrast, the results revealed that Korean children tended to find body and coda more accessible, and that the growth trajectories for body and rime awareness differed. Korean children had a higher awareness of the body unit than the rime unit at the beginning of the study, and their body awareness grew at a much faster rate than did their rime awareness. These findings support the emerging evidence that young Korean children find body–coda more accessible than onset–rime.