Until about two decades ago, the study of writing systems and their relationship to literacy acquisition was sparse and generally modeled after studies of English language learners. This situation is now changing. As the worldwide demand for literacy continues to grow, researchers from different countries with different language backgrounds have begun examining the connection between their writing systems and literacy acquisition. This text, which derives from a NATO sponsored conference on orthography and literacy, brings together the research of 70 scholars from across the world--the largest assemblage of such experts to date. Their findings are grouped into three parts, as follows: Part I, Literacy Acquisition in Different Writing Systems, describes the relationship between orthography and literacy in twenty-five orthographic systems. This section serves as a handy reference source for understanding the orthographies of languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, English, Icelandic, Kannada, and Kishwahili. Part II, Literacy Acquisition From a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, makes direct comparisons of literacy acquisition in English and other orthographic systems. The overall conclusion that emerges from these eight chapters is that the depth of an orthographic system does influence literacy acquisition primarily by slowing down the acquisition of reading skills. Even so, studies show that dyslexic readers can be found across all orthographic systems whether shallow or deep, which shows that dyslexia also has internal cognitive and biological components. Part III, Literacy Acquisition: Instructional Perspectives, explores literacy acquisition from developmental and instructional perspectives and ends with a look into the future of literacy research. This Handbook is appropriate for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in such diverse fields as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, literacy education, English as a second language, and communication disorders.

This text provides a unique and accessible insight into current research in different orthographies. It presents cross-language comparisons to provide insights into universal aspects of reading development and developmental dyslexia.

Originally published in 1984, the previous two decades had seen a rebirth of psychological interest in the process of reading. Attention had increasingly been directed to aspects of fluent reading, such as eye-movement control or contextual effects within the sentence, to a great extent progress had depended on refinement of the experimental analysis of factors that govern the processing of isolated words. This seemingly narrow concern with word recognition turned out to raise a rich collection of questions about the reader’s access to phonology and meaning. In this volume these questions are pursued across the range of orthographic systems which written languages exhibit.

This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It asks the research question, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggest that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.

With contributions from leading international researchers, Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling offers a critique of current thinking on the research literature into reading, reading comprehension and writing. Each paper in this volume provides an account of empirical research that challenges aspects of accepted models and widely accepted theories about reading and spelling. This book develops the argument for a need to incorporate less widely cited research into popular accounts of written language development and disability, challenging the idea that the development of a universal theory of written language development is attainable. The arguments within the book are explored in three parts: overarching debates in reading and spelling reading and spelling across languages written language difficulties and approaches to teaching. Opening up the existing debates, and incorporating psychological theory and the politics surrounding the teaching and learning of reading and spelling, this edited collection offers some challenging points for reflection about how the discipline of psychology as a whole approaches the study of written language skills. Highlighting ground-breaking new perspectives, this book forms essential reading for all researchers and practitioners with a focus on the development of reading and spelling skills.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.