Reading and spelling processes in Welsh–English bilinguals: differential effects of concurrent vocalisation tasks

Abstract

Theories of literacy acquisition, developed mostly with reference to English, have characterised this process as passing through a series of stages. The culmination of this process is a strategy which takes account of the complex relationship between graphemes and phonemes within a deep orthography (Frith (1985). In K. Patterson, & M. Coltheart, (Eds.), Surface dyslexia: Neuropsychological and cognitive studies of phonological reading (pp. 301–330). London: Erlbaum). In addition, recent studies (Arab-Moghaddam & Senechal (2001). International Journal of Behavioural Development, 25, 140) have found that different strategies are used to decode and produce words according to the orthographic depth of the script involved. The present studies used Welsh–English bilingual children to investigate the effect of orthographic depth on the use of phonological recoding in reading and spelling. The first experiment investigated the effects of concurrent vocalisation on spelling in English and Welsh and found that spelling in Welsh was adversely affected by this phonologically disruptive task. A second experiment found that concurrent vocalisation had a deleterious effect on reading for meaning in English and Welsh in the case of younger children, but only affected reading in Welsh in older children. Overall, these results indicate a differential involvement of phonological processes across the two languages in the tasks of reading and writing.