Characteristics of poor readers of Korean hangul : auditory, visual and phonological processing

The vast majority of work on the processing characteristics of poor readers has been conducted with readers of English. In this article we report on results that outline the processing characteristics of poor readers of the Korean alphabetic-syllabic script, hangul.Three groups of readers (10 good readers, 10 poor readers and 9 poor readers with lownonverbal IQ) were tested on a range of visual, auditory and phonological processing tasks. Consistent with a number of studies in English, it was found that compared to good readers, poor readers made more mistakes on a same-different tone-matching task at shortISIs. Likewise, some of the poor readers needed longer ISIs to perceive auditory groupings. Hangul poor readers also performed comparatively worse on two measures of phonological awareness. However, unlike many studies in English, the current study failed to find evidence that poor readers were less sensitive to the perception of rapidly changing visual stimuli. We suggest that this may be due to the processing support provided by properties of the hangul script; particularly the way letters are grouped into syllables and the constraints of letter order within syllables. These results suggest that theories of reading disability that invoke sensory processing deficits need to take into account how such deficits interact with the task of reading.