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

The vast majority of work on the processingcharacteristics of poor readers has beenconducted with readers of English. In thisarticle we report on results that outline theprocessing characteristics of poor readers ofthe Korean alphabetic-syllabic script, hangul.Three groups of readers (10 good readers, 10poor 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 asame-different tone-matching task at shortISIs. Likewise, some of the poor readers neededlonger ISIs to perceive auditory groupings.Hangul poor readers also performed comparativelyworse on two measures of phonologicalawareness. However, unlike many studies inEnglish, the current study failed to findevidence that poor readers were less sensitiveto the perception of rapidly changing visualstimuli. We suggest that this may be due to theprocessing support provided by properties ofthe hangul script; particularly the way lettersare grouped into syllables and the constraintsof letter order within syllables. These resultssuggest that theories of reading disabilitythat invoke sensory processing deficits need totake into account how such deficits interactwith the task of reading.