Introduction to this Special Issue on Reading and its Development across Orthographies: State of the Science

Recent research has brought about important theoretical issues that are relevant to the study of reading and its development. To begin with, there is evidence that both universal and particular principles underly reading processes, processes of learning to read and its precursors. There is also evidence for variability in reading and spelling of words and that this variability may be associated with variation in relevant precursor measures and in general principles of learning like statistical learning, linguistic characteristics like processing of prosodic information, and genetic principles. The research that has established these observations has focused mainly on alphabetic orthographies, particularly English. However, there have been suggestions from studies in other languages that learning to read may differ across languages and writing systems. We think that now the time is right to bring together this expertise in this special issue, presenting a collection of reviews on recent research on learning to read across languages and writing systems, with a special focus on cross-language and cross-writing system perspectives.

Reading and its development

Reading implies the decoding of written language with the purpose to understand it. The development of reading is supported by a learned sensitivity to the phonological units of language: syllables, onset-rime units, or phonemes (see Seidenberg, 2011). Importantly, the awareness of these units has been found to be important in decoding written language (McBride-Chang et al., 2008). Through literacy socialization and schooling, children learn the inventory of graphic forms of a written language that provide the connection points to spoken language units and gain knowledge of how specific orthographic units map onto specific phonological units (Ehri, 2014). Mostly through reading experience, children learn to increase the inventory of familiar words and to gain word identification fluency (Perfetti, 1992). They also learn to attend to morphological affixes, build sentence constituents, and use sentence boundaries and paragraph structures to guide comprehension (Cain & Barnes, 2017). By making inferences and adding relevant knowledge, they learn to construct an enriched mental model of the meaning of the text (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).

A cross-linguistic perspective

Writing systems can typologically be classified according to the language units they represent. Morphemes, syllables, and phonemes may serve as the linguistic units that map onto graphs. All orthographies used around the world encode language, often with a mix of these units. In learning to read, children must learn how exactly their written language code reveals meaning via a layer of graphic forms. There is evidence that universals apply to reading and its development (see Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2017 or Daniels & Share, 2018 for similar arguments). First, there is evidence that across orthographies word reading and spelling activate phonology and morphology. Moreover, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming can be seen as important precursors of reading development. Another universal in reading is that familiarity shifts reading from computation to retrieval (Seidenberg, 2017). With regard to reading comprehension, it can be claimed that across orthographies, word knowledge can be considered the driver of text comprehension (Perfetti, 2007). Furthermore, cross-linguistic evidence confirms the assumption of the Simple View of Reading (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993) that reading comprehension is highly accounted for by word decoding and listening comprehension (Florit & Cain, 2011; Kim 2017).

The present issue

The goal of this special issue was to provide a clear, meaningful, cross-linguistic perspective on reading and its development. Our working assumption is that what is universal is that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships among the surface forms of written words and their meanings. However, because writing systems vary in how they represent the languages they encode and because languages substantially differ in phonological, syntactic, and morphological structures, particular effects across writing systems and orthographies can also be predicted. This special issue considers the variability in written language and its impact on reading and its development. It especially targets work that informs better understanding of the universals and particulars that influence the processing of written language. The current collection of review papers focuses on cross-linguistic operating principles and precursors in learning to read, variability in reading and writing words, and the role of statistical learning, prosodics, and genetics across languages and writing systems. Each of the six review contributions has a very specific focus, but they all make the important point that a broad perspective on reading integrating relevant evidence from different languages and writing systems is necessary in order to advance the Science of Reading.

In the first article, Grigorenko (2022) discusses the role of genetics in reading and its development across languages and writing systems. By reviewing behavioral as well as molecular genetics evidence on reading acquisition and dyslexia, she demonstrates clearly that reading has a genetic basis. At the same time, the interesting point is made that reading is an evolutionary recent skill and that the time for genetic variants to adapt to specific writing systems is probably insufficient. However, the strength of the genetic influence depends on the environment in which the child grows up. For instance, earlier and more structured reading preparation in preschool may reduce heritability estimates (Samuelsson et al., 2008). Characteristics of the writing system to be learned may well be one such environmental feature.

In the following article, Landerl, Castles, and Parrila (2022) evaluate the current evidence on cognitive precursors of reading in different orthographies by reviewing studies with a crosslinguistic research design. They discuss findings on graphic symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming, which have all been reported to be related with reading acquisition in all orthographies investigated. Except for rapid naming, this association proved mostly interactive, indicating that young children typically develop their graph knowledge, phonological, and morphological awareness during reading development. Cross-linguistic evidence involving alphabetic and non-alphabetic phonologically transparent orthographies suggests that phonological awareness is less of a stumbling block than in the complex English orthography. With regard to future research, cross-linguistic research designs are recommended to test limits of reading theories that were initially developed for alphabetic orthographies.

In the next article, McBride, Pan, and Mohseni (2022) review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. They examine characteristics and boundaries of a word in different scripts and languages and how these may present challenges for reading and spelling. As a case in point, they argue that morphological awareness can be considered central to word reading in Chinese because of the distinct, but overlapping, influences of the single character as compared to multiple-character words. They also highlight the substantial variability in how phonological sensitivity and orthographic knowledge are associated with word reading and word writing across scripts and languages. They recommend that variability in different writing systems should be considered in theoretical models and intervention methods of reading or writing are tested across different writing systems.

Next, Treiman and Kessler (2022) examine statistical learning principles in reading and spelling words. The evidence on statistical learning in the context of reading development comes mostly from alphabetic orthographies, but very similar processes can be assumed to be of universal relevance. The authors start from the assumption that in learning to read and spell the statistical build-up of written forms of words and their linkage to spoken language must be learned. They also assume that writing systems include formal and functional patterns pertaining to the appearance of written words, and the links between units of writing and units of language. It is claimed that learners of various writing systems extract such patterns through statistical learning. Statistical learning is considered to be slow and incomplete, and highly dependent on direct instruction. In contrast with the common focus on statistical learning skill as an ability of individual learners, it is argued that it is more productive to attend to the statistical patterns as embodied in writing systems. With an eye on future research, it is recommended to uncover such patterns in order to explain similarities and differences in learning to read and spell across writing systems.

In the next contribution, Verhoeven and Perfetti (2022) provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across 17 different orthographies. To identify the crosslinguistic variation in the learned sensitivity of readers to the systematic relationships between the surface forms of written words and their meanings, a broad group of languages was chosen, representing syllabic, morphosyllabic, alphasyllabic (abugida), abjad, and alphabetic writing systems. The systematic variation among these languages in their written forms and in their mapping of writing units to language units was examined. A subset of nine universal operating principles in learning to read across languages and writing systems was identified for becoming linguistically aware, word identification and reading comprehension. These universals involve the mapping of writing onto language notwithstanding the details of the writing system and supposedly create a common challenge in learning to read while highlighting the importance of experience leading to familiarity-based identification across languages. Besides, particulars were assumed to apply to the different linguistic levels that are engaged during reading and the various ways in which written forms are accommodated by the structure of the written language. This paper thus provides a profound conceptual background to cross-linguistic reading research.

In the final article, Wade-Woolley, Wood, Chan, and Weidman (2022) explore the role of suprasegmental phonology in reading across languages and writing systems. The relevance of stress and intonation on reading and its development has often been neglected, perhaps because suprasegmental information is not directly represented in English and many other orthographies. Starting from the Reading Systems Framework (Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), prosody is considered a source of linguistic knowledge regarding the rise and fall of pitch and inflection in speech that may impact the orthographic system, the reading vocabulary and reading comprehension processes in tonal and non-tonal languages. A distinction is made between word, phrase and discourse levels at which suprasegmental phonology may operate in reading processes. Empirical evidence from experimental, longitudinal, and training studies is discussed in perspective of future directions.

Conclusions and outlook

Investigating and identifying universals and particulars of reading and reading development across languages and writing systems is a crucial step in understanding how the human mind reads. Reading has a clear biological basis, even though it is a “young” skill in evolutionary terms and the concept that all children should learn to read in order to fully participate in literate society is only a few centuries old. Reading largely relies on language processes as all orthographies encode spoken language, but the ways in which they do so vary greatly. The collection of papers in this special issue demonstrates impressively, that research has moved a long way from over-focusing on English and other alphabetic orthographies. Evidence on different languages is increasingly available and integrated in theories of reading and its development. To establish a general Science of Reading, it will be important to continue, expand, and cross-validate research efforts to writing systems that have so far been underresearched. Current and future theories of reading and its development need to be explicitly tested in different orthographic contexts. Even though differences may sometimes be only small, the particular ways in which language and writing systems can affect reading is relevant to understand the challenges that children are faced with when they map written and spoken language during reading development. We hope that by bringing together these papers, we will spark further research that will take the field forward and lead to even more comprehensive and integrative frameworks for the study of reading and its development across languages and writing systems.

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