Orthographic Depth and Its Impact on Universal Predictors of Reading: A Cross-Language Investigation

• Published in: Psychological science Vol. 21; no. 4; pp. 551 - 559
• Main Authors: Ziegler, Johannes C., Bertrand, Daisy, Tóth, Dénes, Csépe, Valéria, Reis, Alexandra, Faísca, Luís, Saine, Nina, Lyytinen, Heikki, Vaessen, Anniek, Blomert, Leo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01-04-2010; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Awareness; Child; Child psychology; Children; Children & youth; Consciousness; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Deception; Decoding; Dutch language; Elementary school students; English language; Entropy; Female; Finnish language; French language; Humans; Hungarian language; Intelligence; Language; Language Development; Lying; Male; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Memory; Mental Recall; Names; Naming; Nonverbal intelligence; Orthographies; Orthography; Performance readers; Phonemes; Phonetics; Phonological awareness; Phonology; Portuguese language; Psychological aspects; Reaction Time; Reading; Reading comprehension; Reading disabilities; Scripts; Speed reading; Transparency; Vocabularies & taxonomies; Vocabulary; reading development; phonological awareness; rapid automatized naming; orthographic depth
• ISSN: 0956-7976; 1467-9280; 1467-9280
• DOI: 10.1177/0956797610363406

Alphabetic orthographies differ in the transparency of their letter-sound mappings, with English orthography being less transparent than other alphabetic scripts. The outlier status of English has led scientists to question the generality of findings based on English-language studies. We investigated the role of phonological awareness, memory, vocabulary, rapid naming, and nonverbal intelligence in reading performance across five languages lying at differing positions along a transparency continuum (Finnish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, and French). Results from a sample of 1,265 children in Grade 2 showed that phonological awareness was the main factor associated with reading performance in each language. However, its impact was modulated by the transparency of the orthography, being stronger in less transparent orthographies. The influence of rapid naming was rather weak and limited to reading and decoding speed. Most predictors of reading performance were relatively universal across these alphabetic languages, although their precise weight varied systematically as a function of script transparency.