• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.145-155
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• 2005

This study was carried out to reveal Hangul acquisition processes in Korean-Chinese children who grow in a horizontal bilingual environment. In this experiment Grapheme substitution/deletion tasks and sensible/non-sensible Kulja reading tasks were administered to 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-year-old Korean-Chinese children growing up in a bilingual environment. Results were that Korean-Chinese children showed similar patterns of Hangul acquisition processes to Korean children but acquired grapheme-phoneme(G-P) correspondence earlier than Korean children. Hangul acquisition rates were 41.7%, 45.7%, 53% and 92.7% at age 3, 4, 5 and 6, respectively. Both Korean-Chinese and Korean children showed higher sensitivity for the final consonant than for the initial and middle consonants. Correlation between phoneme perception and reading was only significant among 6-year-olds in non-sensible Kulja reading tasks. Training in transforming ideographic Chinese to a phonetic system could effect early acquisition of G-P correspondence in Korean-Chinese children.