Abstract
We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences.
Highlights
The present study regards reading acquisition in English and Italian, two languages with strong differences in orthographic regularity
The influence of a global factor was detected for both English and Italian children. This factor explained part of the performance for all types of words and non-words: reading performance improved with increasing age, largely independently of the stimulus type
The intercept on the x axis is approximately what we expected (e.g., 300 ms [according to 25]) in the Italian sample; this represents an estimate of the sensory-motor processes not correlated with the duration of the cognitive portion of that task
Summary
The present study regards reading acquisition in English and Italian, two languages with strong differences in orthographic regularity. Orthographic consistency is a major factor in how a child can learn to read [1]. This is clear from a large cross-linguistic investigation of 14 European languages in which word and non-word reading were measured at the end of first grade [2]. Learning to Read in English and Italian and only 34% (over three SDs below the 14-nation mean) in English, the least regular orthography (the second language investigated in the present study). English children had great difficulty reading non-words (29% accuracy compared to the cross-national average of 82%) [2]
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