Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results con rm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and uent in foundation level reading before the end of the rst school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to differences in age of starting or letter knowledge. It is argued that fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible. Syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding, whereas orthographic depth affects both word reading and nonword reading. The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow as in the shallow orthographies. It is hypothesized that the deeper orthographies induce the implementation of a dual (logographic + alphabetic) foundation which takes more than twice as long to establish as the single foundation required for the learning of a shallow orthography.There has been much recent attention to the possibility that the ease of reading acquisition may vary between languages because of differences in 'orthographic depth' (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987 between English, which is regarded as a deep orthography containing many inconsistencies and complexities, and other alphabetic European languages, several of which have shallow orthographies with consistent grapheme -phoneme correspondences. For example, Wimmer and Goswami (1994) compared reading of digits, number names and nonwords formed by exchanging the onsets and rimes of number names by 7-, 8-and 9-year-old children in German and English. Nonword reading was signi cantly slower and more error prone in English at all three age levels. Frith, Wimmer, and Landerl (1998) used structurally equivalent sets of 1-, 2-and 3-syllable nonwords in English and German and again found consistently poorer nonword reading in English. Similar data are reported for comparisons of English with Spanish and French by Goswami, Gombert, and de Barrera (1998) and with Greek by Goswami, Porpodas, and Wheelwright (1997). These studies suggest that the decoding process, which is commonly assigned a central role in theoretical accounts of reading acquisition (Ehri, 1992;Gough & Hillinger, 1980;Share, 1995), develops more slowly and less effectively in English than in other European languages. The present study extends this work to a comparison of English with a wider range of European languages and also seeks to determine the stage in reading acquisition at which the orthographic depth effect becomes evident. The theoretical context is provided by the foundation literacy framework developed by Seymour (1990Seymour ( , 1997Seymour ( , 1999. This pro...

Background: Analyses from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia project show that the key childhood predictors (phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, expressive vocabulary, pseudoword repetition, and letter naming) of dyslexia differentiate the group with reading disability (n ¼ 46) and the group without reading problems (n ¼ 152) at the end of the 2nd grade. These measures were employed at the ages of 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 years and information regarding the familial risk of dyslexia was used to find the most sensitive indices of an individual child's risk for reading disability. Methods: Age-specific and across-age logistic regression models were constructed to produce the risk indices. The predictive ability of the risk indices was explored using the ROC (receiver operating curve) plot. Information from the logistic models was further utilised in illustrating the risk with probability curve presentations. Results: The logistic regression models with familial risk, letter knowledge, phonological awareness and RAN provided a prediction probability above .80 (area under ROC). Conclusions: The models including familial risk status and the three above-mentioned measures offer a rough screening procedure for estimating an individual child's risk for reading disability at the age of 3.5 years. Probability curves are presented as a method of illustrating the risk.

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.