6533b862fe1ef96bd12c7566

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies

subject

description

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development. The present study is an extension of Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) comparative study of reading development in young English and German children. The main finding of Wimmer and Goswami was that 7-, 8-, and 9-year old English children had substantially more difficulties in a pseudoword reading task than German children did. Landerl’s (2000) replication supported Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) findings: in comparison to English children, young German readers in first and second grade displayed a distinct advantage in their ability to read pseudowords with a high degree of accuracy. Another recent replication with a comparison of Spanish and Portuguese children was reported by Defior, Martos, and Cary (2002). Their results show that the pseudoword reading accuracy of Spanish and Portuguese children is relatively similar to the performance of German children and much better than that reported for English children in the aforementioned studies.