Phonological Awareness in Korean-English Bilingual Children

한국어-영어 이중언어사용아동의 음운인식능력

This study investigated whether there are differences between Korean-English bilingual and Korean monolingual children on phonological awareness skills. Participants were 11 Korean-English bilingual children and 12 Korean monolingual children. The children's ages ranged between 6 and 7 years. The results were as follows. First, the bilingual children significantly outperformed monolingual children on overall phonological awareness tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly higher than monolinguals on all three types of phonological awareness tasks (segmentation, deletion, and blending). Second, there was a significant difference between the groups with respect to phonological units of the tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly better than monolinguals on the phonemic unit tasks, but two groups did not differ significantly on syllabic unit tasks. There was an interaction effect between unit size(syllables and phonemes) and group (bilinguals and monolinguals). Third, there were correlations for both bilingual and monolingual children between overall phonological awareness skills and word recognition skills.