In this article, we provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen different orthographies. Starting from the assumption that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships between the surface forms of words and their meanings, we chose a broad group of…

In this paper, we survey current evidence on cognitive precursors of reading in different orthographies by reviewing studies with a cross-linguistic research design. Graphic symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were found to be associated with reading acquisition in all orthographies…

Most current theories of reading and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base: research on English and a handful of other European alphabets. Furthermore, the two dominant theoretical frameworks for describing cross-script diversity--orthographic depth and psycholinguistic grain size theory--are also deeply entrenched in Anglophone…

Due to the variety of their local dialects and accents, Arab learners occasionally face some problems when pronouncing English letters and phonemes. These pronunciation errors are caused by the influence of native language interference. Each language in any part of the world has its linguistic characteristics and rules that control their…

English has a very dynamic status today. One can literally witness its circle widening day by day, engulfing in it a wide spectrum of varieties. English is a pluri-centric language, i.e. language with more than one accepted standard and set of norms for creativity. The spread of English across the globe took place due to two reasons: first, the…

In this classic edition of their ground-breaking work, Usha Goswami and Peter Bryant revisit their influential theory about how phonological skills support the development of literacy. The book describes three causal factors which can account for children's reading and spelling development: (1) pre­school phonological knowledge of rhyme and…

In this article in this "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue that also includes the present article, Grushkin (EJ1174123) argues that the writing difficulties of many deaf and hard of hearing children result primarily from the orthographic nature of the writing system; he proposes a new system based on features found in signed…

The special circumstances of bilingual and second language literacy learning offer investigators an important additional vantage point from which to better understand the components of reading ability. Cross-writing system comparisons complement this perspective. Comparing writing systems and how children learn to read through the medium of each…

This article reports the evaluation of a 10-week phonologically-based literacy programme involving 10 children with Down syndrome (DS). At the outset, each child relied on a whole word method of reading with no apparent use of decoding strategies. The reading and phonological skills of the children were assessed twice prior to undertaking the…

This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and…

The purpose of this paper was to discuss the importance of listening and to examine whether or not transcribing utterances in English using the Korean alphabet improved the accuracy in English sentences produced by a group of Korean college students. A total population of 120 students was divided into two groups, control and experiment. The…

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the…

Children (n = 122) and adults (n = 200) with dyslexia completed rapid automatic naming (RAN) letters, rapid automatic switching (RAS) letters and numbers, executive function (inhibition, verbal fluency), and phonological working memory tasks. Typically developing 3rd (n = 117) and 5th (n = 103) graders completed the RAS task. Instead of analyzing…

Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was…

In this study 149 kindergarten children were assessed for knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and cognitive abilities. Through this it examined child and letter characteristics influencing the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge in a naturalistic context, the relationship between letter-sound knowledge and…