Originally published in 1984, the previous two decades had seen a rebirth of psychological interest in the process of reading. Attention had increasingly been directed to aspects of fluent reading, such as eye-movement control or contextual effects within the sentence, to a great extent progress had depended on refinement of the experimental analysis of factors that govern the processing of isolated words. This seemingly narrow concern with word recognition turned out to raise a rich collection of questions about the reader’s access to phonology and meaning. In this volume these questions are pursued across the range of orthographic systems which written languages exhibit.

This text provides a unique and accessible insight into current research in different orthographies. It presents cross-language comparisons to provide insights into universal aspects of reading development and developmental dyslexia.

Until about two decades ago, the study of writing systems and their relationship to literacy acquisition was sparse and generally modeled after studies of English language learners. This situation is now changing. As the worldwide demand for literacy continues to grow, researchers from different countries with different language backgrounds have begun examining the connection between their writing systems and literacy acquisition. This text, which derives from a NATO sponsored conference on orthography and literacy, brings together the research of 70 scholars from across the world--the largest assemblage of such experts to date. Their findings are grouped into three parts, as follows: Part I, Literacy Acquisition in Different Writing Systems, describes the relationship between orthography and literacy in twenty-five orthographic systems. This section serves as a handy reference source for understanding the orthographies of languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, English, Icelandic, Kannada, and Kishwahili. Part II, Literacy Acquisition From a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, makes direct comparisons of literacy acquisition in English and other orthographic systems. The overall conclusion that emerges from these eight chapters is that the depth of an orthographic system does influence literacy acquisition primarily by slowing down the acquisition of reading skills. Even so, studies show that dyslexic readers can be found across all orthographic systems whether shallow or deep, which shows that dyslexia also has internal cognitive and biological components. Part III, Literacy Acquisition: Instructional Perspectives, explores literacy acquisition from developmental and instructional perspectives and ends with a look into the future of literacy research. This Handbook is appropriate for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in such diverse fields as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, literacy education, English as a second language, and communication disorders.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.

Even though Specific Reading Disability (Dyslexia) has been clinically recognized as a developmental learning disorder for nearly a hundred years. only within the past two decades it has become the subject of major experimental investigation. Because. by definition. dyslexic children are of average or superior intelligence. it is often suspected that some arcane feature of the written language is responsible for the inordinate difficulty experienced by these children in learning to read. The occasional claim that developmental dyslexia is virtually nonexistent in some languages coupled with the fact that languages differ in their writing systems has further rendered orthography a subject of serious investigation. The present Volume represents a collection of preliminary reports of investigations that explored the relationship between orthography and reading disabilities in different languages. Even though not explicitly stated. these reports are concerned with the question whether or not some orthographies are easier to learn to read and write than others. One dimension on which orthographies differ from each other is the kind of relationship they bear to pronunciation. The orthographies examined in this book range from the ones that have a simple one-to one grapheme-phoneme relationship to those which have a more complex relationship.

Around the world, children embark on learning to read in their home language or writing system. But does their specific language, and how it is written, make a difference to how they learn? How is learning to read English similar to or different from learning in other languages? Is reading alphabetic writing a different challenge from reading syllabic or logographic writing? Learning to Read across Languages and Writing Systems examines these questions across seventeen languages representing the world's different major writing systems. Each chapter highlights the key features of a specific language, exploring research on learning to read, spell, and comprehend it, and on implications for education. The editors' introduction describes the global spread of reading and provides a theoretical framework, including operating principles for learning to read. The editors' final chapter draws conclusions about cross-linguistic universal trends, and the challenges posed by specific languages and writing systems.

"This volume is the edited proceedings of a cross-language conference on Orthography, Reading, and Dyslexia held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on September 18-20, 1978, under the joint sponsorship of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) [and others]" -- Preface.