ABSTRACT
Much of the research on the development of children’s word decoding to date has involved the English language, which has a highly irregular orthography with many inconsistencies and complexities (cf. Perfetti, 1985, 1998). For English-speaking children, the foremost task in learning to read is thus to crack the code for unfamiliar words and, in most studies, the focus has therefore been on accurate word identification as opposed to decoding speed. However, there is clear evidence that the ease of word decoding may vary across languages depending on their so-called orthographic depth. Alphabetic orthographies differ in the degree to which they deviate in a principled manner from their underlying phonetic representations and thus in the extent to which deeper lexical/linguistic information is preserved. Recent comparisons have shown the development of word decoding to clearly differ across languages. In studies comparing the reading of words and/or nonwords in English and German (Frith, Wimmer, & Landerl, 1998), in English, Spanish, and French (Goswami, Gombert, & de Barrera, 1998), in English and Greek (Goswami, Porpodas, & Wheelwright, 1997), and in English and Dutch (Patel, Snowling, & de Jong, 2004), English word decoding was found to develop more slowly and less efficiently than word decoding in other alphabetic languages. According to Seymour, Aro, and Erskine (2003), moreover, word-recognition skills may develop independently of word-decoding skills in languages with deep orthographies but closely connected in languages with shallow orthographies.
