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…

Research on literacy has become universal and is essential for researchers of various disciplines, educators, and psychologists. For this article, we examined the most important methodological challenges that arise when conducting literacy research across languages, some of which have long been acknowledged in the relevant literature.…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

The following semi-autobiographical essay tells a cautionary tale about the entrenched Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Alphabetism in reading and reading disabilities (dyslexia) research. Having been born, raised, and educated in an entirely monolingual English-speaking environment, I later migrated to a country where non-European languages…

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…

This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N = 7,669) that focused on leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all…

Lecture given before the Annual Conference and Course on Reading (23d, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa., July 10-21, 1967).

Using a combination of letter-detection and proofreading techniques, subjects searching for target letters in printed text made more errors on correctly spelled words than misspelled words. This word inferiority effect contrasts with the superior perception of letters in words over nonwords commonly found in tachistoscopic studies. (Author/CM)

In this study, written compositions were obtained from each of the elementary students during the four years of testing. The students were shown silent movies--thereby eliminating any possibility of providing spelling clues--and were then asked to write their compositions explaining how the movie made them feel or what they say in the movie. The…

To make this report more readable for teachers and still present all the data, it was compiled in two parts: (1) Report to Teachers and (2) Technical Report. The investigation was conducted (1) to compare the longitudinal effects of the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) and traditional orthography (T.O.) beginning reading programs through and end…

To help reduce the guess work that underpins many phonics programs, a study comprehensively examined the phonic elements of 17,211 words drawn from the 17,310 word list originally compiled by Thorndike and Lorge and later updated by members of the Stanford Spelling Project. Each word in the list was assigned its corresponding respelling that was…

To test the effects of teaching inner-city black children to read in kindergarten and first grade through the initial teaching alphabet, i.t.a. and traditional orthography (TO) groups were compared on their comprehension of single words, short sentences, and related skills. At the first grade level, reading, writing, and oral language skills were…

This study sought to analyze phoneme/grapheme correspondences in a 17,310-entry word list drawn from the Thorndike-Lorge word list and Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Phase one of the research, which has also been reported separately, also sought to determine how closely American-English orthography approximates the alphabetic…