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Language and writing systems are both important in learning to read: a reply to Yamada
Cognition 93 (2004) 133–137 www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT
Discussion
Language and writing systems are both important in learning to read: a reply to Yamada Min Wanga,*, Keiko Kodab, Charles A. Perfettic a
Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, 3304P Benjamin Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA b Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall 160, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA c Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Received 29 October 2003; accepted 29 October 2003
The major criticism raised by Yamada is that the L1 writing system differences could not account for the differences in phonological and orthographic processing in L2 word reading. Instead, Yamada proposed that it is the L1-phonology factors that account for the pattern of findings in our study (Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003). Yamada argued that impoverished phonological inventories in Chinese L1 (with fewer number of syllables and simpler syllabic structures than Korean) account for the lower use of phonology by Chinese L1 readers in reading English words (and consequently, for their heavier reliance on visual information). Yamada further proposed that an L1 transfer model should entail the L1 phonological system rather than the L1 orthographic system. There are indeed two basic language factors involved in learning to read in a second language: The two languages (L1 and L2) and the two writing systems (WS1 and WS2). Both language and writing systems are important, and it will turn out to be nearly impossible to partition transfer effects neatly across the two factors. There is no shared metric that allows differences between languages and differences between writing systems to be placed on the same scale. Furthermore, nature has not been kind enough to provide neat orthogonal contrasts between language and writing. Writing systems, in some sense, have been adaptive to the languages that use them, rather than selected randomly from a menu of systems. In short, Chinese may be well suited linguistically for a “logographic” system. Korean appears to be less well suited for the Chinese system, as evidenced by the rejection in the 15th Century of this system by King Sejong (see DeFrancis, 1989; * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ 1-301-405-8798; fax: þ1-301-405-2891. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Wang). 0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2003.10.014
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Perfetti, 2003). So we have natural confounds and any attempts to disentangle them will need to be heroic, and will even then offer only approximations. On one view of Yamada’s criticism, he and we agree with the above characterization and his comment is essentially a correction toward caution: Don’t assume the difference is in the writing system, it could be in the language system. Indeed, as Yamada notes, we noted this possibility in the paper. On another reading, Yamada has a stronger claim to make: That the language factors are privileged in this issue over the writing system factors. This may be true in some sense, but, as we observed above, it will be difficult to demonstrate. It predicts that any two languages that sharing phonological complexity (e.g. the number of syllables) but that differ in orthographic properties would produce identical reading processes. Correspondingly, languages whose writing systems and orthographies are both identical but whose phonological complexities are different would produce distinct reading strategies. As we have argued, these can be only hypothetical comparisons. For interim progress, that is, until more persuasive if always-imperfect evidence is obtained, we must conclude that phonology and orthography are both important in reading. Learning to read is essentially learning to map printed forms onto spoken forms of language (e.g. Adams, 1990; Perfetti, 1992; Treiman, 1993). To repeat the basis for writing system factors: Writing systems differ in these writing-to-language mapping principles. Alphabetic systems map phonemes to graphemes, whereas logographic (or morpho-syllabic) Chinese maps syllables (which are also morphemes) to graphemes. Because the cross-writing system comparisons are rather restricted, we can look for orthographic influences within a writing system. Within alphabetic system, the transparency of the grapheme –phoneme mappings, or the orthographic depth (Frost, 1994; Katz & Frost, 1992) affects children’s progress in learning to read (e.g. Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Tola, & Katz, 1988; Durgunoglu & Oney, 1999; Frith, Wimmer, & Landerl, 1998; Geva & Siegel, 2000; Goswami, Gombert, & Barrera, 1998; Shimron, 1999). These differences are observed for languages—English versus German, Spanish, and Italian, for example—that are not so different as English and Chinese in phonology, at least in the syllable structures that Yamada noted. For example, readers of a shallow orthography (e.g. Italian) demonstrate an advantage in phonological awareness over readers of English, a less transparent orthography (e.g. English) (Cossu et al., 1988). Goswami et al. (1998) found that children who learn to read English benefit from processing large orthographic units such as rimes than children who learn to read Spanish, a highly transparent orthography. Frith et al. (1998) reported a similar result comparing English with German learners. Neuro-imaging studies of adult reading suggest that not only can reading strategies be affected by the orthography, but that these strategy differences become manifest in the brain structures that are activated during word reading (Paulesu et al., 2000). If such orthographic effects are found within the family of alphabetic writing systems—all within the Indo-European language system—then orthographic effects due to fundamentally different writing systems represented by Chinese and English are not far-fetched. Again, however, writing systems are only part of the picture and the language itself is critical. Reading builds on spoken language. Furthermore, language differences in phonology should directly affect reading in the two languages. Two of the languages of our
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study, Korean and English, provide a demonstration of this effect. Yoon, Bolger, Kwon, and Perfetti (2002) found that readers of English relied on onset-rime structures during reading, in accord with several other studies (e.g. Goswami, 1993; Treiman, Mullenix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995). However, Korean children were not sensitive to the onset-rime structure during reading; instead their reading parsed a syllable into the onset and vowel (the syllable body or syllable nucleus) as one unit and the coda (final consonant) as another. Thus, given a CVC syllable, English children show a preference for C þ VC parsing, whereas Koreans prefer a CV þ C parsing. Both Korean and English are alphabetic systems, so perhaps the difference lies in the spoken languages. Indeed, the same preference differences were found for judgments of similarity to spoken syllables that were identical across the two languages. Yoon et al. argued for “Linguistic Hypothesis”: Differences in preference of reading units originate in linguistic units in the two spoken languages, independent of their orthographic systems. However, Yoon et al. acknowledged the possibility that literacy could come to affect the perception of linguistic units and that the fundamental source of the difference has not yet been completely determined, and that, again, is our point about L1 to L2 transfer effects. There is a lot of work to do to sort out the linguistic factors from the writing system factors in reading transfer. Although the ideal separation of factors is very difficult if not impossible to attain, some progress can be made when studies can exploit situations of one language with two writing systems. This is possible in both Japanese and Chinese. For example, Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, and Hills (2001) compared pre-literate and literate children from Hong Kong and Guangzhou on phonological awareness. Hong Kong and Guangzhou children shared a spoken language (Cantonese), but Guangzhou children learn Pinyin (an alphabetic system used to assist in reading Chinese characters) as well as the well as the traditional Chinese characters. Hong Kong children, on the other hand, are taught characters only. The Guangzhou and Hong Kong pre-literate children did not differ at all levels of phonological awareness tested (i.e. syllables, onset, rime, and coda). Nevertheless, Guangzhou literate children showed more phoneme level awareness (i.e. onset and coda) than the Hong Kong children, presumably because this level of language became salient with alphabetic learning. Of course, this demonstrates an effect of writing system experience on L1 metalinguistic knowledge, not on reading itself. But it does remind us that phonological awareness is not only a function of language but also a function of writing system. We must disagree with Yamada’s claim that orthographic learning is secondary to phonological learning and used only to compensate for poor phonological skills resulting from impoverished phonological inventories. The evidence is that orthographic learning plays a critical role in learning to read both alphabetic (e.g. Ehri, 1998) and nonalphabetic writing systems (e.g. Shu & Anderson, 1997, 1999). Our recent research on adult English speakers learning to read Chinese suggests that orthographic learning dominates the early stages of learning to read in this situation (Wang, Liu, & Perfetti, in press; Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). We think this is because of the dramatic visual as well as orthographic differences between English and Chinese. The ability to exploit phonological knowledge is limited at first but takes an increasingly important role with gains in learning. Again, however, our main argument is that the relative importance
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of orthography and phonology is difficult, actually impossible, to specify as a general proposition. Only through specific comparisons of linguistic and orthographic similarities can progress be made on this general proposition. Finally, we comment on Yamada’s characterization of our implicit model of transfer. On Yamada’s characterization, there is a purely orthographic process from O1 to O2, as if an English word would evoke its Chinese character equivalent. We do not assume that an O2 English word activates an O1 character. We assume that an O2 English word activates an L2 word representation—a lexical entry, a phonological form (P2), or semantics (either S2 or a language-independent S). The O2 to P2 (sub-lexical phonology) pathway is available and may be used with varying success, just as would be the case for an L1 English reader. The transfer issue is that in Chinese, the O1 –S1 pathway has worked successfully. And this pathway can work in English as well, in principle. The Chinese reader of English L2, on this transfer hypothesis, attends to orthography as a visual letter string but perhaps less to grapheme –phoneme correspondences. This is not an all-or-none proposition. Rather, it is that the probability for the O to S route is a bit more likely for the Chinese reader than for the English or Korean reader. This is the route used for exception words by English L1 readers. In this framework, the transfer hypothesis does not have the oddness ascribed to it by Yamada. In fact, our research joins research on bilingual reading models that also emphasize the interaction of L1 orthographic and phonological information in L2 reading (for example, see Dijkstra and Van Heuven’s recent Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA þ ) model; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). We agree with Yamada that the linguistic properties of L2 and their similarity to L1 are critical. Reading in both L1 and L2 build on spoken language. We should be surprised if writing systems have no effect, however.
References Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cheung, H., Chen, H.-C., Lai, C.-Y., Wong, O.-C., & Hills, M. (2001). The development of phonological awareness: Effects of spoken language experience and orthography. Cognition, 81(3), 227–241. Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I. Y., Tola, G., & Katz, L. (1988). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 1–16. DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing system. Honolulu: Univeristy of Hawaii. Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(3), 175–197. Durgunoglu, A. Y., & Oney, B. (1999). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisplinary Journal, 11(4), 281–299. Ehri, L. C. (1998). Grapheme–phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J. L. Metsala, & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Frith, U., Wimmer, H., & Langerl, K. (1998). Differences in phonological recoding in German- and Englishspeaking children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(1), 31–54. Frost, R. (1994). Prelexical and postlexical strategies in reading: Evidence from a deep and shallow orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 116–129. Geva, E., & Siegel, L. (2000). Orthographic and cognitive factors in the concurrent development of basic reading skills in two languages. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12(1–2), 1–30. Goswami, U. (1993). Toward an interactive analogy model of reading development: Decoding vowel graphemes in beginning reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56(3), 443–475.
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Goswami, U., Gombert, J., & Barrera, L. (1998). Children’s orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19(1), 19–52. Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process in different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost, & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning (pp. 67–84). Armsterdam: Elsevier. Paulesu, E., McCrory, E., Fazio, F., Menoncello, L., Brunswick, N., Cappa, S. F., Corelli, M., Cossu, G., Corte, F., Lorusso, M., Pesenti, S., Gallagher, A., Perani, D., Price, C., Frith, C. D., & Frith, U. (2000). A cultural effect on brain function. Nature Neuroscience, 3(1), 91–96. Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading acquisition. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 145 –174). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Perfetti, C. A. (2003). The universal grammar of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 3–24. Shimron, J. (1999). The role of vowel signs in Hebrew: Beyond word recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11(4), 301–319. Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (1997). Role of radical awareness in the character and word acquisition of Chinese children. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(1), 78–89. Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (1999). Learning to read Chinese: The development of metalinguistic awareness. In J. Wang, A. W. Inhoff, & H. C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 1–18). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to spell. New York: Oxford University Press. Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of rimes in the description, use and acquisition of English orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 107–136. Wang, M., Koda, K., & Perfetti, C. A. (2003). Alphabetic and non-alphabetic L1 effects in English word identification: A comparison of Korean and Chinese English L2 learners. Cognition, 87, 129– 149. Wang, M., Liu, Y., & Perfetti, C. A (in press). The implicit and explicit learning of orthographic structure and function of a new writing system. Scientific Studies in Reading. Wang, M., Perfetti, C. A., & Liu, Y. (2003). Alphabetic readers quickly acquire orthographic structure in learning to read Chinese. Scientific Studies in Reading, 72(2), 183–207. Yoon, H. K., Bolger, D. J., & Perfetti, C. A. (2002). Sublexical processes in learning to read: A difference between Korean and English. In L. Vehoeven, C. Elbro, & P. Reisman (Eds.), Precursors of functional literacy (pp. 139–163). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Discussion
Language and writing systems are both important in learning to read: a reply to Yamada Min Wanga,*, Keiko Kodab, Charles A. Perfettic a
Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, 3304P Benjamin Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA b Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall 160, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA c Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Received 29 October 2003; accepted 29 October 2003
The major criticism raised by Yamada is that the L1 writing system differences could not account for the differences in phonological and orthographic processing in L2 word reading. Instead, Yamada proposed that it is the L1-phonology factors that account for the pattern of findings in our study (Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003). Yamada argued that impoverished phonological inventories in Chinese L1 (with fewer number of syllables and simpler syllabic structures than Korean) account for the lower use of phonology by Chinese L1 readers in reading English words (and consequently, for their heavier reliance on visual information). Yamada further proposed that an L1 transfer model should entail the L1 phonological system rather than the L1 orthographic system. There are indeed two basic language factors involved in learning to read in a second language: The two languages (L1 and L2) and the two writing systems (WS1 and WS2). Both language and writing systems are important, and it will turn out to be nearly impossible to partition transfer effects neatly across the two factors. There is no shared metric that allows differences between languages and differences between writing systems to be placed on the same scale. Furthermore, nature has not been kind enough to provide neat orthogonal contrasts between language and writing. Writing systems, in some sense, have been adaptive to the languages that use them, rather than selected randomly from a menu of systems. In short, Chinese may be well suited linguistically for a “logographic” system. Korean appears to be less well suited for the Chinese system, as evidenced by the rejection in the 15th Century of this system by King Sejong (see DeFrancis, 1989; * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ 1-301-405-8798; fax: þ1-301-405-2891. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Wang). 0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2003.10.014
134
M. Wang et al. / Cognition 93 (2004) 133–137
Perfetti, 2003). So we have natural confounds and any attempts to disentangle them will need to be heroic, and will even then offer only approximations. On one view of Yamada’s criticism, he and we agree with the above characterization and his comment is essentially a correction toward caution: Don’t assume the difference is in the writing system, it could be in the language system. Indeed, as Yamada notes, we noted this possibility in the paper. On another reading, Yamada has a stronger claim to make: That the language factors are privileged in this issue over the writing system factors. This may be true in some sense, but, as we observed above, it will be difficult to demonstrate. It predicts that any two languages that sharing phonological complexity (e.g. the number of syllables) but that differ in orthographic properties would produce identical reading processes. Correspondingly, languages whose writing systems and orthographies are both identical but whose phonological complexities are different would produce distinct reading strategies. As we have argued, these can be only hypothetical comparisons. For interim progress, that is, until more persuasive if always-imperfect evidence is obtained, we must conclude that phonology and orthography are both important in reading. Learning to read is essentially learning to map printed forms onto spoken forms of language (e.g. Adams, 1990; Perfetti, 1992; Treiman, 1993). To repeat the basis for writing system factors: Writing systems differ in these writing-to-language mapping principles. Alphabetic systems map phonemes to graphemes, whereas logographic (or morpho-syllabic) Chinese maps syllables (which are also morphemes) to graphemes. Because the cross-writing system comparisons are rather restricted, we can look for orthographic influences within a writing system. Within alphabetic system, the transparency of the grapheme –phoneme mappings, or the orthographic depth (Frost, 1994; Katz & Frost, 1992) affects children’s progress in learning to read (e.g. Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Tola, & Katz, 1988; Durgunoglu & Oney, 1999; Frith, Wimmer, & Landerl, 1998; Geva & Siegel, 2000; Goswami, Gombert, & Barrera, 1998; Shimron, 1999). These differences are observed for languages—English versus German, Spanish, and Italian, for example—that are not so different as English and Chinese in phonology, at least in the syllable structures that Yamada noted. For example, readers of a shallow orthography (e.g. Italian) demonstrate an advantage in phonological awareness over readers of English, a less transparent orthography (e.g. English) (Cossu et al., 1988). Goswami et al. (1998) found that children who learn to read English benefit from processing large orthographic units such as rimes than children who learn to read Spanish, a highly transparent orthography. Frith et al. (1998) reported a similar result comparing English with German learners. Neuro-imaging studies of adult reading suggest that not only can reading strategies be affected by the orthography, but that these strategy differences become manifest in the brain structures that are activated during word reading (Paulesu et al., 2000). If such orthographic effects are found within the family of alphabetic writing systems—all within the Indo-European language system—then orthographic effects due to fundamentally different writing systems represented by Chinese and English are not far-fetched. Again, however, writing systems are only part of the picture and the language itself is critical. Reading builds on spoken language. Furthermore, language differences in phonology should directly affect reading in the two languages. Two of the languages of our
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study, Korean and English, provide a demonstration of this effect. Yoon, Bolger, Kwon, and Perfetti (2002) found that readers of English relied on onset-rime structures during reading, in accord with several other studies (e.g. Goswami, 1993; Treiman, Mullenix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995). However, Korean children were not sensitive to the onset-rime structure during reading; instead their reading parsed a syllable into the onset and vowel (the syllable body or syllable nucleus) as one unit and the coda (final consonant) as another. Thus, given a CVC syllable, English children show a preference for C þ VC parsing, whereas Koreans prefer a CV þ C parsing. Both Korean and English are alphabetic systems, so perhaps the difference lies in the spoken languages. Indeed, the same preference differences were found for judgments of similarity to spoken syllables that were identical across the two languages. Yoon et al. argued for “Linguistic Hypothesis”: Differences in preference of reading units originate in linguistic units in the two spoken languages, independent of their orthographic systems. However, Yoon et al. acknowledged the possibility that literacy could come to affect the perception of linguistic units and that the fundamental source of the difference has not yet been completely determined, and that, again, is our point about L1 to L2 transfer effects. There is a lot of work to do to sort out the linguistic factors from the writing system factors in reading transfer. Although the ideal separation of factors is very difficult if not impossible to attain, some progress can be made when studies can exploit situations of one language with two writing systems. This is possible in both Japanese and Chinese. For example, Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, and Hills (2001) compared pre-literate and literate children from Hong Kong and Guangzhou on phonological awareness. Hong Kong and Guangzhou children shared a spoken language (Cantonese), but Guangzhou children learn Pinyin (an alphabetic system used to assist in reading Chinese characters) as well as the well as the traditional Chinese characters. Hong Kong children, on the other hand, are taught characters only. The Guangzhou and Hong Kong pre-literate children did not differ at all levels of phonological awareness tested (i.e. syllables, onset, rime, and coda). Nevertheless, Guangzhou literate children showed more phoneme level awareness (i.e. onset and coda) than the Hong Kong children, presumably because this level of language became salient with alphabetic learning. Of course, this demonstrates an effect of writing system experience on L1 metalinguistic knowledge, not on reading itself. But it does remind us that phonological awareness is not only a function of language but also a function of writing system. We must disagree with Yamada’s claim that orthographic learning is secondary to phonological learning and used only to compensate for poor phonological skills resulting from impoverished phonological inventories. The evidence is that orthographic learning plays a critical role in learning to read both alphabetic (e.g. Ehri, 1998) and nonalphabetic writing systems (e.g. Shu & Anderson, 1997, 1999). Our recent research on adult English speakers learning to read Chinese suggests that orthographic learning dominates the early stages of learning to read in this situation (Wang, Liu, & Perfetti, in press; Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). We think this is because of the dramatic visual as well as orthographic differences between English and Chinese. The ability to exploit phonological knowledge is limited at first but takes an increasingly important role with gains in learning. Again, however, our main argument is that the relative importance
136
M. Wang et al. / Cognition 93 (2004) 133–137
of orthography and phonology is difficult, actually impossible, to specify as a general proposition. Only through specific comparisons of linguistic and orthographic similarities can progress be made on this general proposition. Finally, we comment on Yamada’s characterization of our implicit model of transfer. On Yamada’s characterization, there is a purely orthographic process from O1 to O2, as if an English word would evoke its Chinese character equivalent. We do not assume that an O2 English word activates an O1 character. We assume that an O2 English word activates an L2 word representation—a lexical entry, a phonological form (P2), or semantics (either S2 or a language-independent S). The O2 to P2 (sub-lexical phonology) pathway is available and may be used with varying success, just as would be the case for an L1 English reader. The transfer issue is that in Chinese, the O1 –S1 pathway has worked successfully. And this pathway can work in English as well, in principle. The Chinese reader of English L2, on this transfer hypothesis, attends to orthography as a visual letter string but perhaps less to grapheme –phoneme correspondences. This is not an all-or-none proposition. Rather, it is that the probability for the O to S route is a bit more likely for the Chinese reader than for the English or Korean reader. This is the route used for exception words by English L1 readers. In this framework, the transfer hypothesis does not have the oddness ascribed to it by Yamada. In fact, our research joins research on bilingual reading models that also emphasize the interaction of L1 orthographic and phonological information in L2 reading (for example, see Dijkstra and Van Heuven’s recent Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA þ ) model; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). We agree with Yamada that the linguistic properties of L2 and their similarity to L1 are critical. Reading in both L1 and L2 build on spoken language. We should be surprised if writing systems have no effect, however.
References Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cheung, H., Chen, H.-C., Lai, C.-Y., Wong, O.-C., & Hills, M. (2001). The development of phonological awareness: Effects of spoken language experience and orthography. Cognition, 81(3), 227–241. Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I. Y., Tola, G., & Katz, L. (1988). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 1–16. DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing system. Honolulu: Univeristy of Hawaii. Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(3), 175–197. Durgunoglu, A. Y., & Oney, B. (1999). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisplinary Journal, 11(4), 281–299. Ehri, L. C. (1998). Grapheme–phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J. L. Metsala, & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Frith, U., Wimmer, H., & Langerl, K. (1998). Differences in phonological recoding in German- and Englishspeaking children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(1), 31–54. Frost, R. (1994). Prelexical and postlexical strategies in reading: Evidence from a deep and shallow orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 116–129. Geva, E., & Siegel, L. (2000). Orthographic and cognitive factors in the concurrent development of basic reading skills in two languages. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12(1–2), 1–30. Goswami, U. (1993). Toward an interactive analogy model of reading development: Decoding vowel graphemes in beginning reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56(3), 443–475.
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Goswami, U., Gombert, J., & Barrera, L. (1998). Children’s orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19(1), 19–52. Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process in different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost, & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning (pp. 67–84). Armsterdam: Elsevier. Paulesu, E., McCrory, E., Fazio, F., Menoncello, L., Brunswick, N., Cappa, S. F., Corelli, M., Cossu, G., Corte, F., Lorusso, M., Pesenti, S., Gallagher, A., Perani, D., Price, C., Frith, C. D., & Frith, U. (2000). A cultural effect on brain function. Nature Neuroscience, 3(1), 91–96. Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading acquisition. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 145 –174). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Perfetti, C. A. (2003). The universal grammar of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 3–24. Shimron, J. (1999). The role of vowel signs in Hebrew: Beyond word recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11(4), 301–319. Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (1997). Role of radical awareness in the character and word acquisition of Chinese children. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(1), 78–89. Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (1999). Learning to read Chinese: The development of metalinguistic awareness. In J. Wang, A. W. Inhoff, & H. C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 1–18). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to spell. New York: Oxford University Press. Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of rimes in the description, use and acquisition of English orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 107–136. Wang, M., Koda, K., & Perfetti, C. A. (2003). Alphabetic and non-alphabetic L1 effects in English word identification: A comparison of Korean and Chinese English L2 learners. Cognition, 87, 129– 149. Wang, M., Liu, Y., & Perfetti, C. A (in press). The implicit and explicit learning of orthographic structure and function of a new writing system. Scientific Studies in Reading. Wang, M., Perfetti, C. A., & Liu, Y. (2003). Alphabetic readers quickly acquire orthographic structure in learning to read Chinese. Scientific Studies in Reading, 72(2), 183–207. Yoon, H. K., Bolger, D. J., & Perfetti, C. A. (2002). Sublexical processes in learning to read: A difference between Korean and English. In L. Vehoeven, C. Elbro, & P. Reisman (Eds.), Precursors of functional literacy (pp. 139–163). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.