The development of reading across languages

Abstract

A selective review is presented of empirical evidence from different languages concerning phonological development and reading development in children. It is demonstrated that the development of reading depends on phonological awareness in all languages so far studied. However, because languages vary in syllable structure and in the consistency with which phonology is represented by the orthography, there are developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and in the reading strategies that develop across languages. It is argued that these cross-language data can be explained by a psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and its development, as proposed by Ziegler and Goswami.