Abstract
Reading is an essential skill in modern societies, yet not all learners necessarily become proficient readers. Theoretical concepts (e.g., the orthographic depth hypothesis; the grain size theory) as well as empirical evidence suggest that certain orthographies are easier to learn than others. The present paper reviews the literature on orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity of alphabetic languages. These notions are elaborated to show that differences in reading acquisition reflect fundamental differences in the nature of the phonological recoding and reading strategies developing in response to the specific orthography to be learned. The present paper provides a narrative, cross-linguistic and integrated literature review, thereby contributing to the development of universal reading models and at the same time pointing out the important differences between orthographies at the more detailed level. Our review also yields suggestions to devise language-specific instruction and interventions for the development of the specific reading strategies required by the characteristics of the orthography being acquired.
Highlights
Reading is an essential skill in modern societies, yet depending on the orthography and exact diagnostic criteria used, 5–17.5% of children suffer from dyslexia and face persisting problems with reading and spelling (Habib and Giraud, 2013)
The simple view of reading, a model suggested by Gough and Tunmer (1986) and Hoover and Gough (1990), in short holds that reading comprehension skills can be predicted from two components: decoding abilities, defined as efficient visual word recognition, and linguistic comprehension, which is the ability to use information at the lexical or word level to achieve sentence and discourse interpretations (Hoover and Gough, 1990). Both components are considered necessary for reading success, while neither decoding capacity nor linguistic comprehension by itself is sufficient
The level of orthographic transparency has been shown to influence the expression of dyslexia
Summary
Reading is an essential skill in modern societies, yet depending on the orthography and exact diagnostic criteria used, 5–17.5% of children suffer from dyslexia and face persisting problems with reading and spelling (Habib and Giraud, 2013). Research no longer focuses solely on English; reading problems in other languages have been receiving increased attention (Landerl et al, 2013; Peterson and Pennington, 2015). The different letters of the word are identified one at a time by shifts of the eyes and shifts of attention while the reader learns what sounds they correspond to. This process hinges on two key sources of information available at this point: alphabetical knowledge and spoken vocabulary (Grainger and Ziegler, 2011)
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