Abstract
We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were administered measures of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming speed. In Grade 2, they were administered measures of nonword decoding, text-reading fluency, and spelling. The results showed that the model for nonword decoding in Greek was similar to that of Finnish (both have consistent grapheme-to-phoneme mappings) while the model for spelling in Greek was similar to that of English (both have some inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme mappings). In addition, the models for nonword decoding and spelling in Finnish were similar, because Finnish is consistent in both directions. Letter knowledge dominated the prediction in each language. The predictable role of orthographic consistency on literacy acquisition is discussed.
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Notes
Historically, cross-linguistic differences in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences were examined in the context of the orthographic depth hypothesis (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Katz & Feldman, 1983). According to this hypothesis, readers adapt their processing strategies to the demands of the orthography they are reading. In consistent orthographies, for example, readers are encouraged to use the phonological pathway to decode words because the mapping between graphemes and phonemes is unambiguous. The orthographies that are purely phonetic have consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences. English is an extreme example of a language in which morphological information is also coded in spelling. Orthographic consistency can be best thought as a continuum (e.g., Aro, 2006; Seymour et al., 2003). Whereas we might remain uncertain as to where on this continuum each orthography is objectively located, we can be certain of the extreme positions of this continuum. English is one of the most irregular alphabetic orthographies and Finnish is certainly one of the most regular.
Orthographic representation is defined as a memory of a word’s spelling. Sight word recognition requires that the reader has access to fully specified orthographic representations (Perfetti, 1992). That is, the input code is sufficient to uniquely identify the word to be read without the need to discriminate between several competing partially activated candidates (e.g., the th in thin and then, or the ou in foul and soul).
The Finnish children were assessed at the age of 5.5 years instead of 6.5 because we wanted to have the same starting point across languages and because many of the Finnish children are able to decode simple words, when they are actually in Kindergarten at the age of 6.5 years (e.g., Leppänen et al., 2006). This, in turn, would affect the importance of the other cognitive skills involved in the study. Although the children in Greece and in Canada were retested 2 years after the first assessment, the Finnish children were, in fact, retested 3 years after the first assessment because they then attended Kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2.
Because the Greek children are not taught letter names at school or at home, letter-sound knowledge is a better proxy of their letter knowledge. The Greek children are introduced to letter names (e.g., alpha, beta, gama etc.) at the end of Grade 1 and after they have mastered reading.
Previous research has indicated that the length of the RAN tasks does not affect the RAN-reading relationship. It is the number of accessed stimuli that may impact the RAN-reading relationship, such that higher correlations may be observed between RAN and reading when the RAN task requires the child to access 25 letters repeated twice (Clarke, Hulme, & Snowling, 2005) than when accessing 5 letters repeated ten times (Wolf et al., 1986).
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We would like to thank Dr. Mikko Aro for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
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Georgiou, G.K., Torppa, M., Manolitsis, G. et al. Longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling across languages varying in orthographic consistency. Read Writ 25, 321–346 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9271-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9271-x