Becoming Literate in Different Languages; Similar Problems, Different Solutions

Developmental Science 9:5 (2006), pp 429–453

© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

TARGET ARTICLE WITH COMMENTARIES AND RESPONSE

Becoming literate in different languages: similar problems, different solutions

Johannes C. Ziegler

1

and Usha Goswami

2

1. Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS and University of Provence, France2. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

For commentaries on this article see Durguno

g

lu (2006), Frost (2006), De Jong (2006), Paulesu (2006), Caravolas(2006), Wimmer (2006) and Pugh (2006).

Abstract

The teaching of reading in different languages should be informed by an effective evidence base. Although most children willeventually become competent, indeed skilled, readers of their languages, the pre-reading (e.g. phonological awareness) and lan-guage skills that they bring to school may differ in systematic ways for different language environments. A thorough understandingof potential differences is required if literacy teaching is to be optimized in different languages. Here we propose a theoreticalframework based on a psycholinguistic grain size approach to guide the collection of evidence in different countries. We arguethat the development of reading depends on children’s phonological awareness in all languages studied to date. However, wepropose that because languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography, there are develop-mental differences in the grain size of lexical representations, and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategiesacross orthographies.

Introduction

Reading is about gaining access to meaning fromprinted symbols. To access meaning from print, the childmust learn the code used by their culture for represent-ing speech by a series of visual symbols. The first stepsin becoming literate, therefore, require acquisition of thesystem for mapping distinctive visual symbols onto unitsof sound (phonology). This mapping process is called

phonological recoding

(Share, 1995). Mastery of thisprocess allows the child to access the thousands of wordsthat are present in their spoken lexicons prior to reading,and also to recode words that they have heard but neverseen before. Phonological recoding works well as a

self-teaching

device, because the relationship between symboland sound is systematic in most languages (e.g. the symbol‘D’ is always pronounced /d/ at the beginning of a word).In contrast, mapping visual symbols directly onto unitsof meaning, as would be required by some sort of visualor ‘logographic’ learning, is difficult because the relation-ship between symbol and meaning is arbitrary. That is,

knowing that a word starts with the letter ‘D’ tells thechild nothing about its meaning.

It has become quite clear over recent years that visuallearning does not represent a viable alternative to pho-nological recoding. Share (1995) compares visual learn-ing to memorizing large slabs of a telephone directory:

Like printed letter strings, telephone numbers contain asmall set of symbols . . . Unless all numbers are dialed cor-rectly

and

in the right order the connection will fail . . .Unfortunately, there are no systematic or predictable relation-ships between these strings and their corresponding entries;so each of the many thousands of such associations mustbe painstakingly committed to memory. There may exist afew rare individuals who are capable of memorizing entiretelephone directories, but for the normal child about tolearn to read, the absurdity of this task should be obvious.(Share, 1995, p. 159)

Although phonological recoding is a much more effi-cient strategy than logographic learning, it neverthelesshas a few problems of its own. The biggest problem hasto do with inconsistency in the symbol-to-sound

Address for correspondence: Usha Goswami, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB4 1HW, UK; e-mail: [email protected]

430 Johannes C. Ziegler and Usha Goswami

© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

mapping (Ziegler, Stone & Jacobs, 1997). In some ortho-graphies, one letter or letter cluster can have multiplepronunciations (e.g. English, Danish), whereas in othersit is always pronounced in the same way (e.g. Greek,Italian, Spanish). Similarly, in some orthographies, aphoneme can have multiple spellings (e.g. English,French, Hebrew), whereas in others it is almost alwaysspelled the same way (e.g. Italian). English is exception-ally inconsistent because it exhibits a high degree ofinconsistency in both directions (i.e. for reading andspelling). This variation across languages makes it likelythat there will be differences in reading developmentacross languages (and probably also in spelling develop-ment). It is relatively easy to learn about phonemes ifone letter consistently maps onto one and the samephoneme, or if one phoneme consistently maps to oneand the same letter. It is relatively difficult to learn aboutphonemes if a letter can be pronounced in multipleways (e.g. the letter ‘A’ in English maps onto a differentphoneme in the highly familiar words ‘cat’, ‘was’, ‘saw’,‘made’ and ‘car’).

Reading development across languages

The most ambitious cross-language reading comparisonto date has been conducted by the

European ConcertedAction on Learning Disorders as a Barrier to HumanDevelopment.

Participating scientists from 14 EuropeanCommunity countries developed a matched set of itemsof simple real words and nonwords. These items were thengiven to children from each country during their firstyear of reading instruction (for details see Seymour, Aro& Erskine, 2003). Thus, children varied in age, but wereequated for degree of reading instruction across ortho-graphy. Although method of reading instruction itselfcould not be equated exactly, schools were chosen so thatall children were experiencing phoneme-level ‘phonics’teaching. The results are summarized in Table 1.

The most striking finding from the study was that thechildren who were acquiring reading in orthographicallyconsistent languages (Greek, Finnish, German, Italian,Spanish) were close to ceiling in both word and nonwordreading by the middle of first grade. In contrast, English-speaking children performed extremely poorly (34%correct). Danish (71% correct), Portuguese (73% correct)and French (79% correct) children showed somewhatreduced levels of recoding accuracy, which is in line withthe reduced consistency of these languages. Analogousresults were obtained in smaller-scale studies, comparingFrench, Spanish and English (Goswami, Gombert & deBarrera, 1998), and English and German (Frith, Wimmer& Landerl, 1998).

One potential problem with these cross-language com-parisons are socio-cultural differences across languages.For example, there may be differences in school systems,curricula, teaching methods and demographic distribu-tions. This problem has begun to be addressed, however.Bruck, Genesee and Caravolas (1997) followed a groupof English- and French-speaking children who werefrom the same area in Canada. They investigated wordand nonword reading at the end of grade 1, using high-frequency regular monosyllabic words and nonwords.The results showed that the English-speaking childrenlagged behind the French-speaking children by about27% on nonword reading and 24% on word reading.Similar findings were obtained comparing beginningreading in English and Welsh. In parts of North Wales,English and Welsh are spoken and read side by side. Incontrast to English, however, the writing system ofWelsh is highly consistent. Parents choose whether theywant their child to attend English or Welsh schooling.These schools serve the same geographical catchmentarea, are administered by the same local educationauthorities, and follow similar curricula and teachingapproaches. The only real difference is the language ofinstruction. Yet, the results showed that the Welsh-speaking children could read well over twice as manywords as the English-speaking children after the sameamount of reading instruction.

Why is reading English so much more difficult?

The reduced consistency of the English writing system inboth reading and spelling is probably the key factor inexplaining the dramatic differences in reading acquisi-tion across languages. Interestingly, English is particularly

Table 1 Data (% correct) from the large-scale study of readingskills at the end of grade 1 in 14 European languages (adaptedfrom Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003)

Language Familiar real words Pseudowords

Greek 98 92Finnish 98 95German 98 94Austrian German 97 92Italian 95 89Spanish 95 89Swedish 95 88Dutch 95 82Icelandic 94 86Norwegian 92 91French 79 85Portuguese 73 77Danish 71 54Scottish English 34 29

Becoming literate in different languages 431


inconsistent with respect to small reading units (lettersor letter clusters corresponding to single phonemes).English is less inconsistent with respect to larger readingunits, such as rimes or syllables (Treiman, Mullennix,Bijeljac-Babic & Richmond-Welty, 1995). This makes itlikely that English children may be developing recodingstrategies at more than one grain size. There are moreorthographic units to learn when the grain size is bigthan when the grain size is small. For instance, inorder to decode the most frequent 3000 monosyllabicEnglish words at the level of the rime, a child needs tolearn mappings between approximately 600 differentorthographic patterns and 400 phonological rimes, farmore than would be needed if the child could simplylearn how to map 26 letters onto 26 phonemes. Butrelying solely on grapheme–phoneme correspondencesleads to inefficient recoding of English. In contrast,young learners of relatively consistent languages canfocus exclusively at the ‘small’ psycholinguistic grain sizeof the phoneme without making many reading errors.Consistent feedback received in terms of achievingcorrect pronunciations will further reinforce the acquisi-tion process.

Psycholinguistic grain size theory

(Ziegler & Goswami,2005) takes these factors into account. The theory sug-gests that the dramatic differences in reading accuracyand reading speed found across orthographies reflectfundamental differences in the nature of the phonologi-cal recoding and reading strategies that are developingin response to the orthography. Children who are learn-ing to read more orthographically consistent languages,such as Greek, German, Spanish or Italian, rely heavilyon grapheme–phoneme recoding strategies becausegrapheme–phoneme correspondences are relatively con-sistent. Children who are learning to read less ortho-graphically consistent languages, like English, cannotuse smaller grain sizes as easily, because inconsistency ismuch higher for smaller grapheme units than for largerunits like rimes. As a consequence, English-speakingchildren need to use a variety of recoding strategies,supplementing grapheme–phoneme conversion strategieswith the recognition of letter patterns for rimes andattempts at whole word recognition.

Recent studies have indeed shown that inconsistentorthographies like English appear to push readers intodeveloping both ‘small unit’ and ‘large unit’ recodingstrategies in parallel (e.g. Brown & Deavers, 1999). Tostudy the flexible and adaptive use of different grainsizes in reading English, Goswami and colleagues (Gos-wami, Ziegler, Dalton & Schneider, 2003) asked Germanand English children to read aloud several lists of non-words. One list contained familiar orthographic patternsat a larger grain size (‘large unit’ nonwords, like

dake

[

cake

,

make

] and

murn

[

burn

,

turn

] ). Another list con-tained only unfamiliar large unit patterns (‘small unit’nonwords, like

daik

and

mirn

). The prediction was thatif a list contained only ‘large unit’ nonwords, then theexclusive application of a large grain size strategy shouldbe very successful. In contrast, if the list contained only‘small unit’ nonwords, then recoding should be mostsuccessful if an exclusively small grain size strategy wasapplied. The critical prediction was for a third ‘mixed’list. If both types of nonwords were mixed within a par-ticular list (e.g.

daik

,

murn

), continual switching between‘small unit’ and ‘large unit’ processing may be required,incurring a switching cost. Consistent with this predic-tion, the results showed switching costs for the Englishchildren but not for the Germans. Blocking word lists bygrain size apparently helped the English readers to focusat a single grain size, which increased recoding accuracyparticularly for large unit items (like

dake

; here the childcan use rhyme analogies to

make

,

cake

,

bake

, etc.).German readers did not show these ‘blocking’ effects.The absence of a blocking effect for the German readerswas taken as evidence that they already relied exclusivelyon processing at the small grain size level.

Similar conclusions come from studies on readingaloud ‘sound-alike’ nonwords, so-called pseudohomo-phones (e.g. ‘faik’). It has been shown that Englishchildren show much stronger influences from wholeword phonology than German children of the same age(Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton & Schneider, 2001). That is,English children showed a significant advantage in namingpseudohomophones in comparison to orthographiccontrol nonwords (e.g. ‘faik’ read better than ‘daik’),whereas German children did not. This suggests thatEnglish children were more affected by whole word pho-nology when reading nonwords than German children.German children decoded nonwords that did not soundlike real words as efficiently as nonwords that did soundlike real words, resulting in an absence of the pseudo-homophone effect in naming.

The important role of teaching

In alphabetic orthographies, the grain size problem istackled by the teacher, who typically begins to teachreading from the single letter. The child is taught letter–sound correspondences, and hence learns about pho-nemes. As a result, phonological representations forwords, which typically represent syllable and onset-rimeinformation prior to reading, are rapidly augmentedwith phoneme-level information. Experience with writ-ten language changes the nature of phonological repre-sentations. In particular, it boosts phoneme awareness,



which, in turn, becomes the strongest predictor of suc-cessful reading, a reciprocal relationship (Perfetti, Beck,Bell & Hughes, 1987; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky& Seidenberg, 2001). Small grain size teaching workswell in a language with consistent letter–sound cor-respondences, such as Italian. However, this teachingmethod works less well in a language with less consistentletter–sound correspondences, such as English.

One approach to this teaching problem in English-speaking countries has been to begin the teaching ofreading at younger and younger ages, and to focus moreand more at the phoneme level. In England itself, thisapproach is formalized in the National Literacy Strategy(DfEE, 1998), which requires the direct teaching of read-ing from the age of 5 years beginning with a phoneme-based strategy. Nevertheless, English children learn to readmore slowly than children from other countries, whomay not begin formal instruction until the age of 7 oreven 8 years. For example, Finnish children begin schoolat 7, and are reading with 90% accuracy by approxim-ately the tenth week in school (e.g. Seymour

et al.

, 2003).English children who begin school at 4 or 5 years of ageare still struggling to reach 90% accuracy (e.g. for non-word recoding) by age 9 or 10 (Goswami

et al.

, 1998).The slower average rate of learning to read in English

does not seem to occur because of variations in teachingmethod across different countries. Rather, it seems dueto the relatively low orthographic consistency of English.This was demonstrated for example in the English/Welshcomparison described earlier (Ellis & Hooper, 2001).Converging data come from Landerl (2000). She com-pared English children who were being taught to read bya ‘standard’ mixed method of phonics and whole wordrecognition with English children following a specialphonics program that focused almost exclusively onletter–sound correspondences (this was a between-schoolcomparison conducted before the advent of the NationalLiteracy Strategy). She reported that the first gradeEnglish phonics children made almost as many errors ona nonword reading task (43%) as the first grade Englishstandard children (50%, a non-significant difference)compared to 12% errors for a matched German sample.At second grade, a similar pattern was found (Englishstandard

=

29% errors, English phonics

=

23% errors,German children

=

13% errors). It was only by thirdgrade that the English phonics children (7% errors) werecomparable to the German children (14% errors), andby fourth grade that the English standard childrenreached a ‘German’ level of grapheme–phoneme recod-ing skill (12% errors compared to 11% for the Germans).

The teaching methods characteristic of early literacyinstruction in Turkish provide even more striking evi-dence for the relatively minor impact of different phonic

teaching regimes (at least, for children with normal pho-nological skills). Literacy instruction in Turkish elemen-tary schools does not capitalize particularly on the highdegree of orthographic transparency. In first grade, chil-dren are given sentences to memorize. They only receiveinstruction on individual components such as words,syllables or letters following successful rote memorization.Despite this ‘large to small’ grain size method, childrenusually get their ‘red ribbons’ symbolizing good decod-ing skills by December or January of the first schoolyear (see Durguno

g

lu & Oney, 2002). In other countrieswith highly consistent orthographies, such as Greece andHungary, some geographical areas have adopted the‘whole language’ method of initial reading instruction(the whole language method has a meaning-based ratherthan a code-based emphasis; reading is characterized asa ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’ bootstrapped bymeaning). It is not yet clear what the effects on initialreading acquisition will be. However, judging from thedata in Table 1, they are likely to be quite minor forchildren with good phonological skills. The effects onchildren with poor phonological skills are likely to berather greater.

A different approach to the question of the optimalgrain sizes for teaching has been to begin instructionwith correspondences for the larger units that are readilyavailable in the phonological domain, such as rimes orsyllables. As mentioned above, this approach requiresthe child to learn a much larger number of fairly com-plex letter combinations. Nevertheless, such a ‘large unit’approach to teaching appears to lead to broadly similarprogress in reading English as ‘small unit’ approaches.Recently, Walton and his colleagues (Walton, Bowden,Kurtz & Angus, 2001a; Walton & Walton, 2002; Walton,Walton & Felton, 2001b) compared the effectiveness of‘large unit’ and ‘small unit’ approaches to the initialteaching of reading to children in Canada. In these stud-ies, they compared the effects of teaching beginningreaders to read by using a ‘rhyme analogy’ strategy(‘beak’ – ‘peak’, see Goswami, 1986) with the effects ofteaching beginners to read by using a grapheme–phoneme recoding strategy. All the children were pre-readers. Reading ability was assessed following 3 monthsof training, and four different kinds of words were usedto assess different skills (analogy – irregular patterns[

fight

-

sight

], analogy – regular patterns [

bed

-

ted

], letterrecoding [

bat

-

bet

] and nonwords [

hib

]). Walton

et al.

found that both training groups showed broadly equalreading acquisition gains immediately following train-ing. However, whereas the rhyme analogy group couldalso read new words requiring letter-recoding skills, theletter-recoding group could not read new words requir-ing rhyme analogy skills. When reading acquisition was



followed up longitudinally, both treatment groups main-tained their gains over an unseen control group, but therhyme analogy group scored significantly above thisgroup on all four of the reading outcome measures,whereas the letter-recoding group only scored signific-antly above this group on two of the four outcomemeasures.

A third approach has been whole word teaching (theso-called ‘look and say’ methods of reading in and outof vogue since the 1950s). In whole word teaching, chil-dren are taught to recognize words as holistic units, forexample via the use of flash cards (the whole word is‘flashed’ at the child, who must learn a pattern–soundcorrespondence). ‘Look and say’ methods were shown toresult in slower learning than any phonics-based methods(irrespective of grain size) by the work of Chall andothers in the 1970s (e.g. Chall, 1967). Exactly the sameconclusion was reached recently by the National Read-ing Panel (2000) study of early reading in the USA. TheNational Reading Panel also compared the effect sizesreported for ‘large unit’ versus ‘small unit’

phonics

teach-ing using a meta-analysis of relevant studies. The meta-analysis showed that the impact of early ‘large unit’teaching versus early ‘small unit’ teaching was statistic-ally indistinguishable, though the impact was signific-ant in each case (see Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster,Yaghoub-Zadeh & Shanahan, 2001). This meta-analysissupports the experimental findings obtained by Waltonand his colleagues.

Taken together, all three approaches to teaching readinghave a role to play in developing efficient word recognitionin relatively inconsistent orthographies (Rayner

et al.

,2001). For English, some words (like ‘choir’, ‘people’,‘yacht’) have to be learned as distinct patterns, becausethey have no orthographic neighbors at all. Other words,like ‘light’, contain rime spellings that are common tomany other words (90 words in English use the rimepattern ‘-ight’ and are hence orthographic neighbors of‘light’), and pronunciation at the rime level is consistentacross the neighborhood. Still other words are quite con-sistent for letter–phoneme recoding (‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘pen’),and are easily recoded by traditional ‘phonics’. Never-theless, small grain size teaching works especially well inlanguages with consistent letter–sound correspondences.It is an empirical question whether children learning toread such consistent orthographies would benefit fromdirect teaching at complementary grain sizes; certainlysuch tuition does not seem to do any harm, if childrenalready have a strong phonological foundation and/orenough exposure to literacy (e.g. Durguno

g

lu & Oney,1999). A related empirical question is whether there is alevel of cognitive architecture for reading that develops

only

for inconsistent orthographies.

Developmental footprints on skilled reading

Do we need to consider developmental differences forour understanding of skilled reading? One could arguethat the final product of reading development is thesame in different languages despite different develop-mental trajectories. But is this the case? To address thisissue, German and English skilled readers were asked toread aloud words that had highly similar spelling, soundand meaning in both languages (e.g.

zoo

in Englishversus

Zoo

in German; Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs & Braun,2001). These words were not loan words in the respectivelanguages, but genuine German and English words.Orthographic rime effects were used as a marker for‘large unit’ processing and word length effects as amarker for ‘small unit’ processing. It was expected thatGerman readers would show stronger length effects forthe same items compared to English readers, becausetheir basic processing unit is small. In contrast, Englishreaders were expected to show stronger rime effects thanGerman readers. This is exactly what was found, forboth word and nonword reading. This preference musthave been developmentally established, as similar patternsare found in children (Goswami

et al.

, 1998).Interestingly, recent simulation work (Perry & Ziegler,

2002) showed that a connectionist learning model (i.e.the dual process model by Zorzi

et al.

(Zorzi, Houghton& Butterworth, 1998)) could not predict the behavioralpatterns found. This was because the greater consistencyof the German orthography actually drove the Germanmodel to process larger units rather than smaller units.The model adopted the opposite processing pattern tothe one observed for the German adults. At the sametime, the dual route cascaded model (DRC; Coltheart,Rastle, Perry, Langdon & Ziegler, 2001), which can pre-dict the length effect found in German (i.e. the smallgrain size effect), could not predict the greater relianceof English adults on orthographic rime units. This isprobably because neither phonological nor orthographicprocessing is sensitive to rime size units in this model.Thus, data such as these seem to suggest that skilledreading cannot be fully understood unless one takes intoaccount the footprints that development leaves on reading.

Implications for theories of reading

Until recently, the most prominent cross-language read-ing theory has been the

orthographic depth hypothesis

(ODH; Frost, Katz & Bentin, 1987; Katz & Frost, 1992),which was based on the dual route model of reading(Coltheart

et al.

, 2001). The ODH does not postulatethat different psycholinguistic units develop in response



to differences in orthography. Rather, the ODH suggeststhat readers adapt their reliance on the ‘orthographic’(whole word recognition) or ‘phonological’ (recoding)route, depending on the demands of the orthography.In a consistent orthography, readers rely more on the‘phonological’ or nonlexical route, because the mappingbetween letters and sounds is relatively direct and un-ambiguous. In an inconsistent orthography, readers relyless on the phonological route and to a greater extent onthe lexical or ‘orthographic’ route.

One key prediction of the ODH is that phonologicaleffects should be reduced in a relatively inconsistentorthography such as English. However, a large numberof studies found strong phonological effects in Englishin a variety of paradigms (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Rayner,Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995; Van Orden, 1987;Ziegler, Van Orden & Jacobs, 1997). Although Katz andFrost correctly point out that such data only challengethe strong version of the ODH, according to whichpeople who read deep orthographies

never

use phono-logical information, such studies still show that phono-logical processes play a role in reading both consistentand inconsistent orthographies. Indeed, some of theoriginal advocates of the ODH have come to the follow-ing conclusion: ‘We no longer believe that the difference(between shallow and deep orthographies) is one ofwhether or not phonology is routinely involved in visualword recognition . . . we now think that the difference ismerely methodological, a matter of the greater simplicitywith which one can contrive an experimental demonstra-tion of phonological involvement’ (Lukatela & Turvey,1999, p. 1069).

Given that English seems to lie at the extreme end ofthe consistency continuum with regard to orthography–phonology relationships, it might even be the case thatthe prominent dual route architecture (i.e. two separateroutes to pronunciation in the skilled reading system)may in fact only develop for English. This is a particu-larly striking idea given the large number of studiesof reading conducted in English, and the influence thattheoretical models of reading in English have had onmodels in other languages.

Importance of grain size, reading strategy and teaching method

How important are considerations of grain size for under-standing reading development in different languages?One test is to see whether existing connectionist learningmodels derived for English can simulate reading develop-ment in consistent and inconsistent orthographies with-out taking differences in grain size, reading strategies

or teaching methods into account. To explore thisquestion, Hutzler

et al.

(Hutzler, Ziegler, Perry, Wimmer& Zorzi, 2004) compared the performance of two majorconnectionist reading models in two languages, the

triangle

model (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg & Patterson, 1996)and the

two-layer associative

model (Zorzi

et al.

, 1998).These models were trained on a comparable database ofGerman and English words, and were tested on an iden-tical set of German and English nonwords at differentstages during the process of learning to read. Theauthors found that both models showed an overalladvantage for the more consistent orthography (i.e. anadvantage for German over English). However, thenetworks exhibited no cross-language differences duringinitial learning phases. Rather, there were increasinglylarge differences during later learning phases. This is theopposite of the empirical pattern (Frith

et al.

, 1998;Goswami

et al.

, 2001), where German beginning readersoutperform English beginning readers but differencesare attenuating by a reading age of around 10 years.

It seems that the models fail to capture the cross-language learning rate effect because they only deal withthe

implicit

aspects of the learning process. Both modelsare presented with words that are fully segmented intoletters, and they learn about their correspondences witha phonology that is already fully specified in terms ofphonemes. In essence, the

connection

between the twodomains is the only thing that is learned. The modelsbehave as if they already contained fully specified ortho-graphic and phonological representations prior to read-ing. Also, the learning process itself is modelled asbeyond the control of the reader or the teacher – it isimplicit. In real life, however, learning to read starts outwith

explicit

processes, such as the explicit teaching ofsmall grain-size correspondences. It is these explicitprocesses and their potential interactions with the moreimplicit aspects of lexical processing that are missingfrom the models.

As we have argued, a key feature of learning to readconsistent orthographies is the reliability of correspond-ences at small grain sizes. This boosts the acquisition ofphonological recoding and phonemic awareness, espe-cially during the early phases of reading acquisition, andseems to have long-lasting effects on the skilled readingsystem (Ziegler

et al.

, 2001). Given that current connec-tionist learning models are not sufficiently sensitive tothe fact that literacy acquisition in consistent ortho-graphies starts out with explicit teaching of small-unitcorrespondences, the failure of these models to fullycapture the empirical data is not surprising. In fact,when Hutzler

et al.

(2004) pre-trained Zorzi’s two-layerassociative model on simple grapheme–phoneme cor-respondences prior to the word learning process, thus



imitating what happens during phonics teaching, themodel accurately predicted the cross-language learningrate effect. Together, these data suggest that new connec-tionist models need to be developed that can encompasscritical developmental processes.

Conclusions and future directions

The present review clearly suggests that future researcherswill need to integrate domains that have traditionallyworked in isolation. Classically researchers havedesigned their experiments as though skilled reading wasunaffected by reading and language development. Here,we suggest that future research needs to construct criticalmanipulations that can track the mutual dependenciesacross these domains at different points in developmentand across different language environments. This is par-ticularly important if the teaching of reading in differentlanguages is to be informed by an effective evidencebase. Systematic cross-language research conductedwithin a psycholinguistic grain size framework is boundto yield rich pedagogical rewards.

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Becoming Literate in Different Languages; Similar Problems, Different Solutions

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