Read Writ (2012) 25:411431 DOI 10.

1007/s11145-010-9277-4

Do bilingual children possess better phonological awareness? Investigation of Korean monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children
Jennifer Yusun Kang

Published online: 30 October 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This study examined whether there are bilingual advantages in terms of phonological awareness (PA) for children acquiring two phonologically and orthographically different alphabetic languages and investigated the emergent literacy factors that explain variances in their PA, in comparison to monolingual children. The study participants comprised seventy 5- to 6-year-old Korean-English bilingual children who had attended English-medium kindergartens for at least 2 years and fty-six Korean monolingual children whose age and L1 oral language prociency were matched to the bilingual participants. They were tested on a range of PA and emergent literacy skill measures including decoding skills in both Korean and English. The study ndings indicated that (1) the bilingual children had a bilingual advantage in PA tasks in both L1 and L2, (2) there was language transfer in processing L1 and L2 PA for both bilingual and monolingual children, and (3) the PA of the two groups was explained by different factors. The results are discussed in terms of language-specic L1 characteristics and the potential effects of instructional differences in language arts. Keywords Phonological awareness Korean-English bilingual children

Introduction It is well established by now that phonological awareness (PA), an awareness of sounds in spoken words that is often reected in ones ability to manipulate, match, or segment different sound units of the words, such as syllable, phoneme and rime, is an essential factor that explains reading skills in both monolingual and bilingual children (for review, see Adams, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Moreover, in the
J. Y. Kang (&) Department of English Education, Korea University, Sungbuk-Ku Anam-Dong 5-ka, Seoul, Korea e-mail: jenkang@korea.ac.kr

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case of bilingual children, PA transfers across languages and across tasks, and bilingualism seems to be associated with superior PA (Durgunoglu, 2002; Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Geva & Wang, 2001; Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Wooley, 2001). Since most research attention has been on the role of PA in reading development, relatively less effort has been made to explain what language and literacy factors explain PA itself, especially for bilingual children. As a number of studies have revealed language effects on PA transfer across languages and across literacy tasks in bilingual children (Gottardo et al., 2001; Shwartz, Leikin, & Share, 2005), it is important to identify factors that are related to PA development of bilinguals of diverse language combinations, in order to generate further implications for reading development. In fact, most studies on bilingual PA have been limited in a sense that they examined bilinguals of two languages that share many linguistic, phonological, and orthographical properties, such as SpanishEnglish bilinguals, while bilinguals of typologically different languages, such as Korean-English bilinguals, have only rarely received any research attention. Korean, like English, is an alphabetic language with its own writing system called Hangul. It has a transparent orthography with fairly consistent graphemephoneme mappings. Each Korean letter represents a phoneme, and combinations of these letters represent a word/meaning, just like English. However, at the same time, Korean is syllabic in that in writing, combination of Korean letters, thus combination of different phonemes, are written in blocks. Each block represents a syllable, unlike English in which words are represented by string of letters formed in a linear format (Kim, 2007; Sohn, 1999). For example, k/o/m, a word for bear is written in a syllable block , and not as a string of three phonemes, ; s/a/l/a/m, a word for person is written in two syllabic blocks, , instead of . In addition, Korean has a distinct phonotactic and phonological structure in that there is a clear syllabic boundaries in oral language as well as in writing, with predominance of the consonantvowel (CV) syllable type (Kim, 2007). The body unit which comprises such CV (sub)syllabic structure is visually salient in Korean writing system as well, since the body always takes place in the top of the syllabic block while the coda is always placed in the bottom (Kim, 2007). In case of the word (bear) which has a CVC structure, for example, the body (; CV) is located in the top of the syllabic block, whereas coda (; C) is placed in the bottom of the syllabic block. Consequently, Korean-acquiring children tend to categorize a syllable into body and coda subsyllabic units unlike Englishacquiring children who tend to organize a syllable into onset and rime, thus displaying sensitivity to the orthographic characteristics of the language they acquire (Kim, 2009b; Yoon & Derwing, 2001). Due to these unique characteristics of Korean phonology and orthography that are quite distinct from those of English, Korean-English bilingual children who are exposed to both languages at the same time might display patterns of PA development different from other bilingual children. Or, as the two languages are both alphabetic languages, sharing similar structural principles, the PA in one language may still play a facilitative role in the PA of the other languages, despite the seemingly distant orthographic and phonological properties of the two languages.

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Thus, this study attempted to expand our understandings about the relationship between bilingualism and PA skills in L1 and L2, and examined whether bilingual advantages in PA apply to Korean-English bilinguals whose two languages are phonologically and orthographically distant. It also investigated what language and emergent literacy factors explain their PA in the two languages, in comparison to Korean monolingual children.

Background For monolingual children, besides those examining the effectiveness of PA training (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988; Wagner & Rashotte, 1993), studies have found that childrens overall oral prociency was a signicant predictor of PA (Chaney, 1992, 1994). Others have shown that in addition to oral prociency, vocabulary knowledge in particular is a signicant predictor for PA (Metsala, 1999; Metsala & Walley, 1998). These studies attribute the relationship between vocabulary and PA to lexical restructuring processes (Goswami, 2001). That is, PA emerges through spoken language experience, since children, as they acquire more and more words, are required to distinguish similar-sounding words and re-represent the phonological segmentation of those words in order to differentiate them. This lexical restructuring process enables children to attend to smaller sound segments in words. In other words, such awareness of phonological representation of words [emerges] primarily as the result of spoken vocabulary growth (p. 114). However, as Goswami admits, such relationships were studied mostly with English-acquiring children, and not much is known about whether those still hold for children acquiring different languages with different levels of transparency. Another factor associated with PA development is letter name knowledge. Wagner et al. (1997), in their longitudinal study of English monolingual childrens development of phonological processing and decoding, indicated that individual differences in letter name knowledge, but not word decoding, inuence individual differences in the development of PA. They attributed this relation to the fact that letter names themselves usually carry the phonemes that provide information about their sounds. Stahl and Murray (1994) similarly found that letter name knowledge may enable children to manipulate onsets and rimes. Although not as much research has been conducted on PA development of languages other than English, Read, Zhang, Nie, and Ding (1986) compared phonological processing of Chinese adults literate in only Chinese characters with those literate in both characters and alphabetic writing, and provided evidence that it is the exposure to alphabetic writing, and not cognitive maturation or literacy in non-alphabetic language, that determine ones PA, or specically, phoneme awareness. In other words, as they concluded, it is not literacy in general which leads to [phoneme awareness], but alphabetic literacy in particular (p. 46). This claim further suggests that monolingual children acquiring language and literacy of a non-alphabetic language may not have as heightened PA as children exposed to an alphabetic language or

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bilingual children whose rst language (L1) and/or second language (L2) follows alphabetic principles. Related to the role of letter name knowledge on the development of PA, many researchers have highlighted the reciprocal relationship between PA and reading (decoding) abilities (Bowey, 1994; Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Kolinsky, Cary, & Morais, 1987; Stahl & Murray, 1994; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). These studies concur that certain levels of PA are needed for early reading but that more advanced levels [of PA] result from learning to read (Stahl & Murray, p. 223). In other words, once children learn to read, they begin to have conscious awareness of oral language and thus begin to use a spelling strategy in PA tasks, trying to match the number of letters in the word with the kinds of sound they should hear and using the grapheme information to represent phonological segmental information (Ehri & Wilce, 1985; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Wagner, Torgesen, and Rashotte (1994), in their longitudinal study, revealed that the causal relations between PA and early reading are indeed bidirectional, as PA had a strong causal inuence on word decoding and letter name knowledge had a causal inuence on childrens PA. Goswami and East (2000) further suggested that such a reciprocal relationship between PA and learning to read can be extended to different levels of PA. Although much more attention has been paid to the development of PA in monolingual children, there is a growing interest in the PA skills of bilingual children (Loizou & Stuart, 2003). One group of such studies compared the PA skills of bilingual and monolingual children, and identied the general advantage of bilinguals in PA tasks. Campbell and Sais (1995), for example, compared the phonological skills of four-year-old English monolingual and English-Italian bilingual children. The bilingual children showed superior performance overall. They explained this phenomenon in terms of the regularity of syllable and phonological structure of Italian, which, they suggest, facilitate the development of PA in general. Oller, Cobo-Lewis, and Eilers (1998) similarly showed that Spanish English bilingual children had genuine phonological processing abilities to the extent that they could phonologically translate pseudowords, compared to the English monolingual children who relied on memory for tasks that require phonological processing. Others, too, have shown that bilingualism seems to facilitate certain types of PA (Bialystok, 1988; Galambos & Hakuta, 1988; Shwartz et al., 2005). However, bilingualism per se may not guarantee superior performance in PA tasks (Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003). In their study on the phoneme segmentation task, a bilingual advantage was observed only in SpanishEnglish bilinguals among 5- and 6-year-old, English-French, EnglishSpanish, and EnglishChinese bilingual children. In addition, Bialystok, Luk, and Kwan (2005) studied the literacy skills of four groups of rst-grade children with each group representing a different combination of language and writing system: English monolingual, Cantonese-English bilingual, Hebrew-English bilingual, and SpanishEnglish bilinguals. They found a larger advantage for children learning two alphabetic systems. Furthermore, bilinguals transferred literacy skills across languages only when both languages were written in the same writing system. Therefore, the extent of the bilingual PA facilitation seems to depend on the degree of similarity between

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the phonological and orthographic structures of the two languages. As Dickinson, McCabe, Clark-Chiarelli, and Wolf (2004) argue, the languages in which a child is bilingual will determine the extent of the impact of their bilingualism (p. 328) on their PA performance. In fact, other research has shown that bilingual advantages are exhibited differently for different levels of phonological units in each language, reecting a language-specic phonological system. Bruck and Genesee (1995), for example, compared rst-grade Canadian English-French bilingual and English-speaking monolingual childrens PA skills at different levels longitudinally and found that bilingual children had superior performance at syllable and onset-rime level while monolingual children showed superior performance at the phoneme level. They attributed the monolingual childrens better performance at the phoneme level to their learning to read and write in English and the bilingual childrens better performance at syllable level to the extra salience of the syllable in French. StuartSmith and Martin (1999), on the other hand, tested PA at different levels in PunjabiEnglish speaking bilingual children in both Punjabi and English. They showed a superior performance on English versions of rhyme judgment and phoneme segmentation tests and an advantage for Punjabi versions of the onset isolation, coda isolation, and phoneme blending tests. Furthermore, Loizou and Stuart (2003) examined levels of PA development in monolingual and bilingual English and Greek 5-year-olds and showed that the bilingual English-Greek children signicantly outperformed the monolingual English children, but that this pattern did not persist in the bilingual Greek-English and monolingual Greek comparisons. This may suggest that performance in some PA tasks might vary across languages due to the specic linguistic features of the different languages (Caravolas & Bruck, 1993). In other words, bilingual advantages may be observed in only certain bilinguals handling certain pairs of languages. It may be the case that bilingual children acquiring two phonologically and orthographically different languages, such as Korean-English bilinguals, may not show superiority in phonological processing compared to their monolingual counterparts. Despite this implication, not much attention has been paid to the effects of bilingualism on the PA of bilinguals whose two languages do not share many phonological or orthographical properties. Although there has been growing interest in exploring bilingual childrens PA development, especially in relation to their reading development, relatively less effort has focused on explaining the factors that predict bilingual childrens PA in the two languages, especially when the two languages are markedly different in their orthographic and phonological system. Unlike studies with monolingual speakers that provided a systematic account for the role of oral language prociency, vocabulary knowledge, letter name knowledge, and literacy skills in general in PA development, research with bilingual speakers has mainly focused on the relationship between PA in the two languages and between PA in one language and literacy skills in the other language (Cisero & Royer, 1995; Branum-Martin et al., 2006; Dickinson et al., 2004; Durgunoglu, 1998). Such L1-L2 PA relationships were not limited to bilinguals who acquired orthographically similar languages (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005; Luk, 2003). Luk (2003), for example, reported correlations between phonological skills in Chinese and English

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for Chinese-English bilinguals. PA in the two languages was signicantly correlated even after controlling for working memory and nonverbal intelligence, but there was no effect across languages from phonological skills to reading. Examination of past research has revealed that unlike studies with monolinguals that identied specic language and literacy factors that explain their PA development, relatively less study has examined bilingual children, especially those that acquire two linguistically very different languages. Most studies with bilinguals have examined the transfer effects on PA, thus focusing on the role of L1 PA in explaining L2 PA and their role in further reading development, without considering other L1 and/or L2 language and literacy factors. In other words, sufcient evidence remains to be collected to determine whether the same factors that explain monolingual childrens PAvocabulary knowledge, oral language prociency, letter name knowledge, and word reading skillsalso predict bilingual childrens PA in the two languages. In addition, more attention needs to be paid to bilingual advantage in PA for children acquiring two typologically different languages that may or may not have similar writing systems. This study aims to investigate whether bilingualism facilitates better PA among Korean-English bilingual children and to examine whether emergent literacy factors explain the PA of Korean monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children when their oral language abilities are taken into consideration. The ndings from this study will shed light on the relationship between language and literacy factors in relation to the PA acquisition of bilinguals acquiring two orthographically and phonologically distant, alphabetic languages.

Method Participants Two groups of children participated in this study: 56 Korean monolingual (ML) children attending a regular Korean-medium kindergarten and 70 Korean-English bilingual (BL) children attending English-medium kindergartens. The ML participants comprised 28 boys and 28 girls, whose ages ranged from 4;11 to 6;9. The BL children comprised 31 boys and 39 girls, whose ages ranged from 5;1 to 6;9. Kindergarten is not part of public school system in Korea, and nor is it part of elementary education. Thus, kindergartens in Korea are usually run with preschools, which explains the relatively high variability in age of the participants. Both groups of participants were from middle- to upper-middle SES families in Seoul, Korea, and all of their parents had received at least 4-year college education. None of the participants had lived abroad. Both parents of all of the participants were native Korean speakers, and all reported speaking only Korean at home. In the case of ML children, all instructions and activities during school day, from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, were conducted in Korean only, except for their 15-min daily English lesson. This brief daily English lesson was the only time they were exposed to English in school, watching short video clips, learning English songs, nursery rhymes, and short formulaic expressions, and being read to

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short stories.1 The BL children, on the other hand, had been attending English immersion preschools/kindergartens where only English was used as the medium of instruction for at least 2 years. Thus, the BL participants had received at least 2 years of exposure to the English language for about 5 hours a day. They were bilinguals in a sense that they could carry out conversations and produce extended (narrative) discourse in English. The English-immersion kindergartens they were attending allowed no use of Korean and did not provide any Korean language or literacy instruction. Thus, the BL children in this study did not receive any formal Korean literacy instruction. However, reecting the peculiar Korean educational trendmost children enter rst grade already prepared with word decoding skills, or are expected to have acquired fundamental literacy skills before entering elementary school (Kim, 2009b, p. 61), as they mostly master them in preschools either through formal or informal instruction (Park, 1988)as well as the advantage of having a shallow orthography with transparent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, the BL children in this study were already reading and writing in Korean uently when tested. Measures The measures administered in this study included PA tasks, letter name identication, word- and pseudoword reading, and receptive vocabulary administered in both English and Korean. Since standardized Korean measures of PA and emergent literacy skills are not yet available, all the Korean measures used in this study were adapted from the study by Kim (2008). More specically, the following measures were used: Phonological awareness tasks Phoneme awareness For testing English phoneme awareness, 10 items were used from the initial phoneme matching task of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999). Children were asked to point to a picture that had the same beginning sound as the word they heard. Each correct answer scored one point, and the maximum possible score was 10. For testing Korean phoneme awareness, the children were told to point to the picture of the word that did not share the same beginning sound (phoneme oddity task) among the three words they heard (e.g., /pae/, /mu/, /pi/). There were 15 items on the test, and each correct answer scored one point. The Cronbachs alpha for the Korean phoneme awareness task was .89.

In a sense, these children were not strictly monolingual, as they were exposed to English, although very briey, on a daily basis. However, because of the general trend in Korean early education, it is almost impossible to nd monolingual Korean children who have no English exposure these days. Thus, these children who do receive limited English exposure (from a Korean-speaking teacher) but cannot yet converse or read in English will be labeled as monolinguals in this study. In fact, none of these monolingual children could speak English beyond one-word level or decode English words yet.

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Rime awareness Ten items from the rime matching task of PAL-RW (Berninger, 2001) were used for testing the childrens English rime awareness. Children were required to choose the picture that rhymed with the word that was spoken to them. Each correct answer scored one point, and the maximum possible score was 10. In assessing their Korean rime awareness, a rime oddity task comprising 15 test items was administered, which asked the children to point to the picture that had a different rime among the three word choices (e.g., /mok/, /tal/, /sok/) they heard. Each correct answer scored one point, the maximum possible score was 15. The Cronbachs alpha for this test was .87. In addition, the participants were tested on their Korean syllable and body awareness. The syllable oddity task required the participants to point to the picture of the word that had a different sound in its rst syllable among the three choices (e.g., /se-su/, /ha-ma/, /ha-nul), and the body oddity task asked the children to select the word that did not share the same sound in its body unit with the other two choices (e.g., /mun/, /bom/, /mul/). Each of these tasked included 15 test items, and each correct answer scored one point. The Cronbachs alpha was .91 for the syllable oddity task and .89 for the body oddity task. All of the words in the Korean PA tasks were common Korean words that children are likely to encounter in everyday interactions. Prior to each task in the two languages, the children were given opportunities to complete two practice test items for which they received feedback in case their answer choice was incorrect. There was no feedback for incorrect answers on real test items. The Korean syllable oddity task included only two-syllable words whereas the other three Korean PA tasks presented both one- and two-syllable words (the rst 10 items on each test consisted of only one-syllable words and the last ve test items consisted of twosyllable words on the rime, body, and phoneme oddity tasks). However, mixtures of one- and two-syllable words were not given within a test item. Vocabulary The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tasks-III (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) was used to test the participants English receptive vocabulary. Children were asked to point to the correct picture, among the four choices that corresponded to the vocabulary word given. The Korean version of the vocabulary measure was a modication of the English PPVT-III. Sixty-ve target words selected from PPVTIII were translated into Korean. There was no overlap between the English and Korean vocabulary test items. Both sets of tests were terminated when the child made ve consecutive errors. Each correct item was given one point. Word reading and Pseudoword reading English word- and pseudoword-reading were measured with the Word Identication and Word Attack sections of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (Woodcock, 1987). Children were shown one word at a time and were told to sound out the word aloud as best they could. The tests contained 50 items for the word reading and 40 items for the pseudoword reading tasks, and each correct answer was given 1 point. For the Korean word reading tasks, 60 common words selected from Korean language arts textbooks were used. The Korean pseudoword reading task consisted of 50 items

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made up with nonsense words that did not violate the Korean spelling system. Each correct answer scored one point. For both Korean and English tests, the tests were stopped when the children gave incorrect responses for ve consecutive words. Letter identication Parts A (Upper-case alphabet recognition) and B (lower-case alphabet recognition) of the Process Assessment of the Learner: Test Battery for Reading and Writing (PAL-RW; Berninger, 2001) were used for the English letter identication test. The maximum score for each subtest was 26 (therefore, 52 total), and each correct letter naming scored one point. For the Korean letter identication task, 40 Korean letters (14 consonants, 5 double consonants, 10 vowels, 11 complex vowels) were arranged in random order. Each correct answer received one point, with a maximum possible score of 40 (Cronbachs = .96). Procedure All tests took place in a quiet area of each kindergarten. Children were tested twice, separately for English and Korean tasks, at a two-week interval. Each child was tested individually and each session lasted approximately 30 min. The ML children were not tested on the English word and pseudoword reading tasks, as they were not yet decoding in English. The order of the languages was counterbalanced across and within schools.

Results Before conducting further analyses, the comparability of the two groups was checked in terms of age, gender, and Korean oral language, measured by Korean vocabulary knowledge, as reported in Table 1. The t-test results indicated that the two groups are not statistically different from each other in terms of age (t = 1.33, p = .19), gender (t = .71, p = .48), and Korean vocabulary knowledge (t = 1.62, p = .11). Thus, further analyses can be based on the assumption that although the BL children had been attending English-medium kindergartens where they used only English, the size of their Korean vocabulary was equivalent to that of the ML children and that their oral language skills were not behind of their ML counterparts. Table 2 displays group means and standard deviations for measures of PA and emergent literacy skills in Korean. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to compare the two groups on their performance on these Korean emergent
Table 1 Comparing mean age, gender distribution, and Korean vocabulary size between the ML and BL children ML children Age (Months) Gender (1 = boy; 2 = girl) Korean vocabulary size 69.84 (6.64) 1.50 (.51) 53.86 (4.16) BL children 71.42 (6.69) 1.56 (.49) 55.15 (4.58) t (p-value) 1.33 (.19) .71 (.48) 1.62 (.11)

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Table 2 Comparison of Korean PA and emergent literacy skills between the ML and BL children ML children Raw score Proportion correct 0.77 (0.23) 0.68 (0.28) 0.52 (0.28) 0.44 (0.27) 0.90 (0.11) 0.91 (0.14) 0.84 (0.25) BL children Raw score Proportion correct 0.90 (0.15) 0.82 (0.25) 0.64 (0.31) 0.70 (0.24) 0.91 (0.12) 0.95 (0.14) 0.93 (0.18) 13.47*** 8.21** 5.50* 35.39*** 0.30 3.13~ 5.71* 5.50*** F

Korean syllable awareness Korean Body-Coda awareness Korean Phoneme awareness Korean Rime awareness Korean Letter ID Korean word reading Korean Pseudoword reading Wilks Lambda
~

11.54 (3.51) 10.16 (4.32) 7.68 (4.27) 6.66 (4.13) 35.96 (4.54) 54.55 (8.63) 41.89 (12.79)

13.47 (2.27) 12.24 (3.67) 9.58 (4.69) 10.54 (3.52) 36.36 (4.68) 57.29 (8.25) 46.66 (9.16)

p \ .10, * p \ .05, ** p \ .01, *** p \ .001

literacy tasks. The MANOVA analysis revealed signicant multivariate group effects (F = 5.50, p \ .001), with signicant univariate effects for Korean PA measures and pseudoword reading. The univariate analysis showed that the two groups had a similar level of letter name knowledge and word decoding skills in Korean. In fact, both groups seemed to have a good grasp of letter name knowledge and word decoding skills in Korean, naming and decoding more than 90% of the letter name identication and word decoding test items correctly. However, the BL children, who had relatively less exposure to Korean language and literacy than the ML children, performed signicantly better in all four of the Korean PA tasks and Korean pseudoword reading. Their signicantly better pseudoword reading abilities suggested that the BL children, being used to handling two languages and thus having better metalinguistic awareness in general, had better strategies and skills to process nonsense word decoding. Another set of MANOVA was conducted in order to compare the two groups in terms of their performance on the English tasks (See Table 3). Not surprisingly, the result indicated signicant group effects for the English emergent literacy tasks and vocabulary knowledge (F = 133.62, p \ .001). The BL children performed significantly better on English PA, vocabulary, and letter name knowledge measures, due to their superior English language ability. That is, although the BL children had similar Korean vocabulary size, Korean letter name knowledge, and Korean word reading skills compared to the ML children, they had signicantly better PA in English and were signicantly more knowledgeable in English vocabulary and letter names. In fact, the BL childrens performance on the English letter name identication task showed a ceiling effect (mean proportion correct = .99), with 72% of them scoring perfectly. In order to examine any potential correlations among the measures of PA and emergent literacy skills, correlation analyses were conducted (See Tables 4 and 5). The results from the correlation analyses reveal that all of the Korean PA measures were signicantly interrelated with one another, for both ML and BL children. The two English PA measures were signicantly correlated for both

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Do bilingual children possess better phonological awareness? Table 3 Comparison of English PA and emergent literacy skills between the ML and BL children ML children Raw score Proportion correct BL children Raw score Proportion correct F

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English vocabulary English Rime awareness English Phoneme awareness English Letter ID English word reading English pseudoword reading Wilks Lambda *** p \ .001

14.48 (7.63) 4.98 (3.00) 3.88 (2.71) 31.23 (17.97) 0.44 (0.28) 0.39 (0.17) 0.60 (0.35)

55.25 (12.43) 8.45 (2.56) 8.79 (2.02) 51.55 (0.78) 44.12 (8.87) 21.77 (8.89) 0.85 (0.26) 0.88 (0.20) 0.99 (0.02) 0.88 (0.18) 0.54 (0.22)

458.98*** 47.58*** 132.11*** 85.58***

133.62***

Note: English word and pseudoword reading scores were not included in the MANOVA analysis

Table 4 Correlations among ML childrens PA and emergent literacy measures in Korean and English Korean PA measures Syllable awareness Korean measures Syllable awareness Body-coda awareness Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Vocabulary Letter ID Word reading Pseudoword reading English measures Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Vocabulary Letter ID
~

English PA measures Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Rime awareness Phoneme awareness

Body-Coda awareness

.49*** .38** .27* .22 .35** .43** .26~ .23 .11 .01 .10 .48*** .44** .00 .05 .16 .37** .28 .17 .06 .19 .31* .07 .01 .08 .24~ .29* .19 .19 .04 .08 .23~ .22 .24~ .07 .12 .07 .29* .32* .23~ .33* .29* .44** .03 .37** .08 .50*** .12 .22 .33* .29**

p\.10, * p \ .05, ** p \ .01, *** p \ .001

groups as well. This further suggests the need to collapse these variables in the subsequent regression analyses. Cross-language transfer of PA was observed only for PA tasks of the same phonological unit(s): For ML children, such same-task transfer was limited to only rime awareness, as signicant relation between phoneme awareness in the two languages, which was the most challenging phonological unit for the ML participants, was not observed. On the other hand, the same-task transfer of PA was observed for both rime and phoneme awareness for

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Table 5 Correlations among BL childrens PA and emergent literacy measures in Korean and English Korean PA measures Syllable awareness Korean measures Syllable awareness Body-coda awareness Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Vocabulary Letter ID Word reading Pseudoword reading English measures Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Vocabulary Letter ID Word reading Pseudoword reading
~

English PA measures Rime awareness Phoneme awareness Rime awareness Phoneme awareness

Body-Coda awareness

.52*** .41*** .43*** .13 .02 .12 .13 .14 .15 .14 .12 .24~ .35** .43*** .55*** .19 .10 .09 .16 .19 .11 .19 .14 .08 .11 .56*** .31* .26* .16 .29* .32* .16 .09 .06 .30* .28* .26* .11 .19 .28* .22~ .28* .03 .11 .35** .42** .14 .36** .31* .26* .53*** .19 .06 .41** .42*** .14 .03 .45*** .37** .19 .43*** .46*** .37**

p\.10, * p \ .05, ** p \ .01, *** p \ .001

BL children. After the PA scores in each language were collapsed into single variables, the correlation between the PA in the two languages was still signicant for both ML and BL children (r = .39, p \ .01; r = .27, p \ .05, respectively). For the ML children, Korean syllable awareness, one of the lower-level PA, was signicantly related to their Korean literacy skills such as letter name knowledge and word decoding abilities. On the contrary, it was upper-level Korean PA such as phoneme awareness that was signicantly related to Korean literacy skills for the BL children. Interestingly, for both groups, their English PA showed signicant correlations with their Korean, as well as English, literacy measures. For the BL children, however, the English PA were signicantly related to relatively more difcult literacy tasks (word and pseudoword reading), but not to letter name knowledge. English vocabulary knowledge did not show any association with either Korean or English PA for both groups. Korean vocabulary knowledge, on the other hand, was signicantly related to the BL childrens Korean rime and phoneme awareness whereas it did not show any correlations with the ML childrens Korean PA. In order to examine the factors that predict childrens PA in the two languages, especially the potential effects that literacy skills may have on their PA, when oral language prociency and PA of the other language were controlled for, hierarchical regression analyses were conducted (See Table 6). Based on the ndings from correlation analyses, the Korean and English PA measures were collapsed into single variables.

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Table 6 Hierarchical regression analyses predicting the Korean and English PA of the ML and BL children ML children Steps Variable R R2 R2 F BL children R R2 R2 F

Korean PA as the outcome 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

~

Age Korean vocabulary Korean*English vocabulary English PA Korean Letter ID Korean*English Letter ID Korean word reading Korean*English word reading Age English vocabulary Korean*English vocabulary Korean PA English Letter ID Korean*English Letter ID English word reading English*Korean word reading p\.10, * p \ .05, ** p \ .01

.06 .07 .11 .42 .46 .46 .53

.00 .01 .01 .18 .21 .21 .28

.00 .00 .01 .17 .03 .00 .07

.02 .12 .39 10.99** 2.29 .17 4.84*

.20 .29 .30 .40 .41 .42 .42 .53

.04 .09 .09 .16 .16 .18 .18 .28 .04 .08 .08 .16 .16 .31 .35 .36

.04 .04 .00 .07 .00 .01 .00 .10 .04 .03 .01 .08 .00 .15 .04 .01

2.52 2.85~ .25 4.96* .18 .82 .25 7.02* 2.71 2.13 .32 5.43* .03 11.95** 2.94~ 1.10

English PA as the outcome .37 .38 .38 .53 .64 .64 .14 .15 .15 .29 .41 .41 .12 .01 .00 .14 .12 .00 9.27** .58 .00 10.66** 11.18** .01 .21 .28 .29 .40 .40 .56 .59 .60

In investigating the language and literacy factors that predict childrens Korean PA, age was entered rst, at Steps 1 as a control variable. For both groups, age was not a signicant predictor of PA. Then, Korean vocabulary knowledge was entered next in order to control for the effect of their general native language oral language prociency. Although it was not a signicant predictor for the ML children, it contributed marginally to the variance in the PA of the BL children. At Step 3, the interaction of Korean and English vocabulary scores was entered in order to take into consideration the degree of childrens bilingualism, and it was not a signicant predictor for either group when vocabulary knowledge was controlled for. Subsequently, English PA, followed by Korean letter name knowledge, the interaction between Korean and English letter name knowledge, Korean word reading, and the interaction between Korean and English word reading skills, in the case of BL children, were entered in order. The interaction between Korean and English letter name knowledge was entered after Korean letter name knowledge to determine the extent to which biliteracy additionally contributes to phonological performance. Then, Korean word reading was entered after letter name knowledge to see whether the word decoding skill contributes additionally to their PA, after controlling for their familiarity with consonants and vowels of their native language and the degree of biliteracy measured by the interaction between the letter name

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knowledge in the two languages. For the BL children, but not for the ML children who were not able to decode in English yet, the interaction between Korean and English word reading scores was also considered at Step 8. It turned out that for both ML and BL children, their English PA contributed a signicant amount of variance to their Korean PA once controlling for their Korean vocabulary knowledge and bilingualism. It is important to note that English PA was a signicant predictor even for the ML participants, whose English PA was much weaker than their Korean one. Korean letter name knowledge did not make additional contribution for both groups, but word reading abilities of the ML children made signicant contribution beyond letter name knowledge, English PA, and Korean vocabulary knowledge Conversely, neither letter name knowledge nor word reading ability made any signicant contribution to explaining the Korean PA of the BL group once their Korean vocabulary knowledge, bilingualism and English PA were controlled for. On the other hand, the degree of biliteracy measured by the interaction between Korean and English word decoding abilities made a positive contribution to the Korean PA of the BL children, over and above their Korean language and literacy skills and measures of bilingualism and biliteracy (10%, p \ .05). In predicting English PA, another set of hierarchical regression analysis was conducted, following a similar order. Age was entered rst, and age was a signicant predictor for the ML childrens English PA, explaining about 13% of the variance. Then, English vocabulary knowledge was entered in the second step to account for the childrens general English ability, and the interaction between Korean and English vocabulary knowledge was entered next to account for the contribution of bilingualism. Neither English vocabulary knowledge nor the interaction between the vocabulary knowledge in the two languages was a signicant predictor for the two groups English PA after controlling for age. In Step 4, Korean PA was entered to examine whether there is any cross-language contribution of L1 PA, and it turned out to be a signicant predictor for both ML and BL childrens English PA once controlling for their English vocabulary knowledge and the degree of bilingualism measured by the interaction between Korean and English vocabulary knowledge. Next, English letter name knowledge was entered to observe the role of childrens familiarity with the alphabets in their PA. For the ML children, English letter name knowledge showed a signicant predictive power, contributing as much as 12% of the variance in PA after controlling for the effects of L1 PA, vocabulary knowledge, bilingualism, and age. However, it did not have such a strong impact on the BL childrens English PA, possibly due to a ceiling effect. Instead, the degree of biliteracy measured by the interaction between Korean and English letter name knowledge contributed signicantly, above and beyond the effects of English letter name, Korean PA and vocabulary knowledge, in explaining the BL childrens English PA. The effect of English decoding skill and the interaction between Korean and English word decoding skills, entered at Step 7 and Step 8, respectively, did not make any additional contribution to BL childrens English PA once other language and literacy measures were controlled for. The effect of English decoding skill on the ML childrens English PA was not examined, because these children were not yet literate in English.

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On the whole, for both ML and BL participants, there was a cross-language contribution of PA in one language to the other. The BL group differed considerably from the ML group in that biliteracy contributed signicantly to PA in the two languages of BL childrenthe interaction between Korean and English decoding skills for explaining Korean PA, and the interaction between Korean and English letter name knowledge for explaining English PAwhen controlling for the effects of PA of the other language and emergent literacy skills of the language of PA.

Discussion and conclusion This study was designed to investigate whether the PA of Korean-English BL children, who are thus acquiring two phonologically and orthographically distinct alphabetic languages in a foreign language context, display similar or different patterns from that of the ML children and to explore whether emergent literacy skills that explain PA in each language are similar or different between the two groups. The study ndings indicated that when comparing the two groups with similar level of L1 oral language prociency and size of letter name knowledge, the BL children who had acquired English through English-medium schooling had superior PA in both Korean (L1) and English (L2), compared to the ML children who had limited exposure to English. That is, although the ML children had much more opportunities to experience and handle L1 language input, it was the BL children, despite their relatively less exposure to L1, who outperformed ML children on metalinguistic awareness tasks that required them to attend to different sound units in their L1. Such pattern persisted across PA tasks on different phonological units examined. This corroborates previous research ndings of BL advantages in PA tasks in children acquiring two Indo-European languages such as EnglishSpanish, English-French, and English-Italian (Campbell & Sais, 1995; Oller et al., 1998). Another interesting nding was that although the two groups did not differ in their word reading skills in L1, the BL children did signicantly better on L1 pseudoword reading. In tasks that require phonological manipulations and applications, BL children exhibited accelerated abilities, compared to the ML children, for both L1 and L2 tasks. This nding accords with that of Oller et al. (1998) who concluded that bilinguals possess better phonological processing abilities, which they apply to even novel contexts, whereas ML children tend to rely on memory. In short, since English and Korean are both alphabetic languages, this study does not verify Read and colleagues (1986) claim that the heightened PA of bilinguals applies only to those of alphabetic languages, but it strengthens the argument that such bilingual advantages apply to bilinguals acquiring two phonologically and orthographically very distinct languages. At the same time, it conrms Bialystok, Luk et al.s observation (2005) that bilingual advantages in PA exist in bilinguals of two alphabetic languages and further expands their claim to include bilinguals of two alphabetic languages with different writing systems. One of the important ndings from this study is that there was a cross-language contribution of PA in one language to the other for ML children as well as BL children. That is, cross-language contribution of PA occurred in both directions

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(both L2 to L1 and L1 to L2) for both groups. Such PA transfer for the BL children was somewhat expected, as it is a phenomenon frequently documented for bilingual children (Cisero & Royer, 1995; Dickinson et al., 2004; Durgunoglu, 1998; Luk, 2003). However, the signicant role of the ML childrens PA in the weaker language (English) in predicting their L1 PA is noteworthy. This nding may be related to the L1-specic orthographic characteristics and literacy instructions practice. Since Korean has a fairly shallow orthography with consistent mappings of letter names and the sounds they make,2 children who can identify the names of the Korean alphabets can sound out most of the letter combinations without much difculty. Thus past research has shown that PA does not seem to play as a critical role in promoting Korean childrens word reading skills as letter name does (Kang, 2009). Consequently, Korean reading (decoding) instruction usually involves letter (name) combination rather than sound combination or manipulations (Park, 1988). Thus, unlike the language arts classes in typical kindergartens in English-speaking countries, where explicit and/or implicit instruction on PA through various activities and resources is quite common, PA instruction is rarely included in the language arts curriculum in Korea and nor is it dealt with in books and songs they encounter. Hence, the ML children in this study must have had little prior experience and training in manipulating and distinguishing different sound units in Korean, and may had to rely on their underdeveloped English PA to perform their L1 PA tasks and, at the same time, also exploit their knowledge of L1 sound patterns when they perform PA tasks in the weaker language (English). This nding is discrepant from Kims (2009a) speculation that L1 characteristics inuence L2 PA in KoreanEnglish bilingual childrens initial stage of bilingualism and that L2 phonological characteristics begin to have an effect on L1 PA only with L2 prociency development. She based her claim on the observation that the Korean English language learners who had been in the United States for two or less than 2 years found body-coda unit more accessible than onset-rime, while those who were born and grew up in the United States found both phonological units equally accessible. However, the English PA of Korean children who had little language and literacy skills in English still had an effect on their Korean PA in this study. This study did not examine the specic phonological units Korean children nd more salient and accessible, so it cannot make a direct comparison to Kims ndings. But the crosslanguage transfer of L2 PA to L1 in very limited, initial-stage bilingual children warrants a further study with children of varying degrees of bilingualism. Except for the cross-language transfer of PA that occurred for both groups in both languages, the two groups displayed quite different patterns of PA. For ML children, their word reading skill played an important role in explaining their PA in Korean, once their English PA, oral language prociency, and letter name knowledge was controlled for. This nding suggests that the ML children may have relied on a spelling strategy (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Since syllable, body-coda, and phoneme boundaries are visually salient in Korean writing, children who can decode
2

The letter names of Korean consonants are all two-syllable long, and both the beginning and ending sound of the letter name match the sound the letter makes. For example, a letter called ni-un () makes the sound /n/, and the a letter called li-ul () makes the sound /l/.

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may nd it useful to visualize the written forms in performing PA tasks. The ML childrens knowledge of English letter names, on the other hand, was a signicant predictor of their English PA beyond Korean PA, English vocabulary knowledge and bilingualism, which is in agreement with previous research with Englishacquiring children (Stahl & Murray, 1994; Wagner et al., 1997). Conversely, the BL childrens emergent literacy skills did not show any explanatory power for their Korean or English PA once their vocabulary knowledge of the particular language and PA of the other language were controlled for. This is a pattern distinct from what has been documented about ML English-speaking children (Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Kolinsky et al., 1987; Wagner & Rashotte, 1993). Even their English word decoding skill did not have any effect on their English PA. That is, although their English word reading skill was signicantly correlated with their English PA, it did not have any predictive power when their Korean PA, English vocabulary knowledge and English letter name knowledge were taken into account. Instead, the degree of biliteracy measured by the interaction of their L1 and L2 reading abilities and that measured by the interaction of their L1 and L2 letter name knowledge were the only signicant predictor for their Korean and English PA, respectively, when their oral language prociency and PA of the other language were taken into consideration. The BL children, unlike the ML children in this study, had already developed a certain level of English decoding skill and had been exposed to various PA-related activities in English through schooling, and thus their phonological processing abilities may have been well beyond the stage where they rely on their emergent literacy skills for PA tasks. In a sense, they may have been well beyond the stage where they utilize spelling strategy (Goswami & Bryant, 1990), and may have relied on their solid understanding of the spelling systems in the two available languages, as could be speculated from the signicant role of the interaction of their Korean and English literacy skills in their PA of the two languages. More important, the interaction between their Korean and English letter name knowledge contributed signicantly to their English PA, despite their highly advanced knowledge of English letter names. This is somewhat contradictory to ndings from other research that showed positive predictive relationship between L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English) letter name and PA for only those with low L1 letter name knowledge (Cardenas-Hagan, Carlson, & Pollard-Durodola, 2007). In short, this study showed not only bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness as documented in other studies (Campbell & Sais, 1995; Schwartz et al., 2005), but also the signicant role of their ability to apply biliterate knowledge and skills in performing metalinguistic tasks that require conscious attention to the sound system of languages. At the same time, further studies that involve Korean English learners with diverse language and literacy prociency levels are in great need to examine how the interplay of L2 prociency and L1 emergent literacy skills affect L2 PA and reading development as documented in other studies with SpanishEnglish bilinguals (Cardenas-Hagan et al., 2007; Proctor, Carlo, August, & Snow, 2005; Proctor, August, Carlo, & Snow, 2006). In addition, contrary to previous studies that found signicant role of vocabulary knowledge in PA development (Metsala, 1999; Metsala & Walley, 1998), the contribution of vocabulary knowledge in the two groups PA was not observed in this study. This may be attributed to their age and the reasonable level of literacy of both

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groups in their L1 (and L2, in the case of the BL children). That is, unlike the case for the younger (and not quite fully literate) children studied by Metsala (1999) and Metsala and Walley (1998), the participants in this study were a little older and also have developed considerable degree of literacy that enabled them to rely on their knowledge of grapheme representation of phonological information in processing a language phonologically, rather than their familiarity with words and their meanings. It is also important to note the potential presence of language effects. Unlike Durgunoglu (1998), who showed that as much as 47% of rst-grade Spanish English bilingual childrens English PA was explained by their L1 PA, this study did not nd such a big role of L1 PA in explaining Korean childrens English PA, or vice versa. In addition to the numerous reasons capable of explaining this relatively weak relationship between the PA in the two languages, the degree of similarities/ differences between the languages cannot be overlooked and should be explored in further studies. That is, although this study provides counterevidence for Bialystok et al. (2005) speculation that bilinguals may transfer their PA only when their two languages share the same writing system, a more in-depth investigation of the interplay of phonological and orthographical differences in the two languages and other emergent literacy factors is needed to generate a rm conclusion. Furthermore, in order to investigate the factors accounting for the BL childrens PA in the two languages, a more thorough study is needed. In fact, only 28 and 36% of the BL childrens PA in Korean and English, respectively, was explained by the variables examined in this study. Furthermore, only 28% of the ML childrens Korean PA was explained by the same variables. One limitation of this study is that it did not include other important factors such as family literacy practice, shared reading experiences at home, and parents literacy support that have been found to be signicant predictors for PA in other studies (Lonigan, Dyer, & Anthony, 1996; Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001). In fact, although the bilingual children in this study have mostly mastered Korean reading skills at home without formal school instruction, information about how they did so was not collected. In addition, since the two groups in this study were immersed in quite different instructional settings, the school factors should be considered as well. Thus, a more complete picture of Korean childrens PA development will require a more comprehensive study that looks not only at basic emergent literacy factors but also at childrens oral prociency level, home literacy factors, school-related instructional factors, and other emergent-literacy related variables. Nevertheless, this study has made important progress in documenting the emergent literacy factors that differently contribute to ML and BL childrens PA in each language and in identifying BL advantages in PA, even for children acquiring two languages that are markedly different in their phonological and orthographic systems. References
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