Speech Categorization Consistency Predicts Language and Reading Abilities in Korean School-Age Children

Abstract

Purpose: Speech perception continues to develop throughout school ageand plays a fundamental role in language and reading development. Recent findings English-speaking children suggest that speech categorization consistency—the stability of a listener’s percept across multiple encounters with a speech soundpredicts both language and reading abilities, with a particularly strong link betwereading skills and vowel perception. One hypothesis is that this is due to compgrapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in English vowels. The present study tested (a) whether the relationship between categorization consistency and languagereading abilities extends to typologically different languages and (b) whethethe vowel-specific link observed in English is shaped by GPC complexity, usidata from Korean, a language with relatively transparent GPCs. Method: Forty-four first-grade Korean-speaking children completed a visual ana-log scale task, in which they heard tokens from a speech continuum and rathe correspondence between the stimulus and each word on a continuous scaStandardized assessments of language and word reading were also conducted. Results: Children with poorer language/reading abilities exhibited lower categorization consistency, which is consistent with the findings from English-speakinchildren. In contrast to prior findings, however, this relationship was not specito vowel perception but was held across all contrast types tested. Categorizatigradiency (slope of the categorization function) was not significantly associatewith any outcome. Conclusions: These findings extend prior workby demonstrating that categorization consistency predicts language and reading abilities, even in a languagwith transparent GPCs. Importantly, this association was observed across aphonemic contrasts, not just vowels—suggesting that the previously observed vowel-specific link in English may stem from the greater GPC complexity English vowels. Together, while categorization consistency appears to be a critcal predictor of linguistic outcome, the specific pattern may vary across laguages depending on the structure of their GPCs.