It has been known that Korean preschoolers are actively engaged in reading and writing development. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent of Korean children's word reading and word writing abilities by phonological, orthographic, and morpho-semantic abilities. Methods: Seventy 5-to 6-year-old children were participants of this study and their average of IQ score was 100. Each child read and wrote 14 two-syllable words and 14 two-syllable nonsense words and the accuracy was scored at grapheme level. Phonological processing abilities were measured by phonological awareness (PA), rapid automized naming (RAN), phonological memory (PM); whereas letter knowledge (LK) and copying skills were measured for orthographic abilities, and morphological awareness (MA), vocabulary, story grammar recalling for morpho-semantic abilities. Multiple regression analyses were performed with SPSS 23.0. Results: LK, RAN, PM, and MA explained 57.2 percent of word reading while LK, RAN, PM, and copying explained 65.1 percent of nonsense word reading. LK, copying, MA explained 66.7 percent of word writing while copying, PA, and LK explained 59.1 percent of nonsense word writing. Conclusion: Given that RAN and PM explained word and nonsense word reading, and PA explained nonsense word writing, phonological processing abilities seemed to be involved in early literacy actively. Korean children seemed to be in partial to full alphabetic stage before formal elementary education. Most interestingly, the dual-route word reading model differentiating lexical and non-lexical route could be applied to Korean children's early reading development. Further studies are needed to explore early identification of developmental dyslexia from the kindergarten level.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of writing ability and writing related variables such as executive functioning (syntactic ability, sentence construction, planning ability) and working memory. Additionally, this study tried to find out the variables that can discriminate between the four groups.Methods: Fourteen 1st to 2nd graders in each group (dyslexia (DY), dyslexia with language difficulty (LRD), language difficulty without dyslexia (LD), and typical development (TD)) participated in four writing tasks and four writing related tasks.Results: First, there were three performance groups in word writing and sentence writing (TD > LD > DY = LRD), while there were two different groups were observed in short text writing and handwriting (TD = LD > DY = LRD). Secondly, there were three performance groups in syntactic skills and sentence construction (TD> DY> LD= LRD) and in planning skills (TD> DY= LD> LRD), while there were two performance groups in copying (TD= LD> DY= LRD). Thirdly, discriminant analysis showed a 94.6% hit ratio; and word writing, syntactic ability, sentence construction, and sentence writing were good discriminators for the four groups.Conclusion: This study was meaningful in including four groups of children considering language and decoding abilities. For 1st to 2nd graders, sentence writing and word writing assessment and intervention considering executive functions seem to play the key role for each student’s school adaptation with language and/or reading difficulties.

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Objectives: Korean developmental dyslexic upper grade children's text comprehension abilities were investigated considering the mode of texts (reading vs listening) as well as the type of texts (narrative vs expository). Methods: Sixteen 5th to 6th graders with developmental dyslexia (DD) and grade and cognition-matched typically developing children (TD) participated in 4 text comprehension tasks. Each child responded to 32 questions, 8 in each text, tapping comprehension of texts counterbalancing the effect of mode and type of texts. Results: First, children with DD performed lower than TD children in text comprehension, reflecting developmental dyslexic Korean children's performance cross linguistically even with the high orthographic transparency of Hangeul. Second, children with DD performed better in the mode of reading compared to the mode of listening, which was the same as the TD children. Third, the effect of type of text was meaningful to only children with DD, while TD children's performance between narrative and expository text was not different. Conclusion: Korean upper grade children with DD seemed to rely heavily on the mode of reading in comprehending texts similarly to their grade-matched children, while children with DD had greater difficulties in comprehending the expository texts both in reading and listening modes compared to the narrative texts. Each child with DD's developmental level of the type and mode of texts needs to be considered to support his/her text comprehension abilities. Further studies need to be extended to the Korean language considering the type of texts with the DIER model.

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