The science of reading has made genuine progress in understanding reading and the teaching of reading, but is the science of reading just the science of reading English? Worldwide, a majority of students learn to read and write in non-European, nonalphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas/alphasyllabaries (e.g., Hindi), or…

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…

In this paper, we argue that second language (L2) reading research, which has been informed by studies involving first language (L1) alphabetic English reading, may be less relevant to L2 readers with non-alphabetic reading backgrounds, such as Chinese readers with an L1 logographic (Chinese character) learning history. We provide both…

This book provides a unique and accessible account of current research on reading and dyslexia in different orthographies. While most research has been conducted in English, this text presents cross-language comparisons to provide insights into universal aspects of reading development and developmental dyslexia in alphabetic and non-alphabetic…

English and Hebrew native speakers read texts mutilated by removing strips at the top or bottom of lines. Reading English texts was impaired more by mutilating the top, but the reverse was found for Hebrew texts, due to the different ways information is distributed along the vertical axis of Roman and Hebrew letters. (Author/GT)

Two experiments were designed to study the relative importance of various letter segments in letter recognition. One experiment was conducted with 24 subjects and the English alphabet, the other with 15 subjects and the Hebrew alphabet. In each experiment a letter was presented for identification, but was preceded by a brief presentation of either…

This paper discusses some psycholinguistic and psychological bases of learning to read in two apparently disparate writing systems, English and Chinese. As an alphabet, English orthography has "more reason than rhyme"; relational units and markers (e.g., "hens" and "hence") are important. The combinatory properties of…

A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test…