Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies

Abstract

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...

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…In contrast to the phonological tasks, Time 2 word and nonword reading broadly confirmed the influence of orthographic depth on literacy acquisition (e.g., Seymour et al, 2003), although Icelandic performance was slightly worse and French performance slightly better than expected (Table 6). The lack of a consistent effect of orthographic depth on phonological development made it seem possible that instruction might be having a strong impact on phoneme awareness and, most especially, on the emergence of explicit awareness of phonemes where variation by the end of the year was minimal.…”

“…1), identifying the shallower orthographies as Finnish, Greek, Spanish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, the intermediate group as Portuguese and French, and the deepest orthographies as Danish and English. Subsequent work has broadly supported this classification except to suggest that French may be a deeper orthography than Portuguese, and that Swedish may be deeper than Icelandic and Norwegian (Borgwaldt, Hellwig, & de Groot, 2005;Serrano et al, 2010;Seymour et al, 2003).…”

“…1). Although orthographic depth is known to influence the rate of reading acquisition (e.g., Seymour et al, 2003;Ziegler et al, 2010), no large-scale study has yet examined the effect of orthographic depth on phonological development.…”

“…While the lack of a clear effect of orthographic depth was surprising (cf. PGS model), orthographic depth was associated with the implementation of the alphabetic principle in reading here as in previous work (e.g., Seymour et al, 2003). Possibilities for future investigation are that orthographic depth may shape the development of phoneme awareness more strongly in the absence of phonics instruction, or that a meta-cognitive ability to focus on sub-lexical sounds may emerge relatively rapidly via instruction but differential effects of spelling-sound correspondence consistency may emerge over a longer time span via statistical learning.…”

“…While the impact of variation between languages on orthographic development has been documented in several large-scale studies (Caravolas et al, 2012;Ellis et al, 2004;Seymour et al, 2003;Ziegler et al, 2010), phonological development has yet to receive the same degree of attention in cross-linguistic research. One consequence of this is that understanding of phonological development in relation to early reading is informed by a predominantly English-language literature with all the disadvantages entailed by over-reliance on what is acknowledged to be an atypical orthography (Share, 2008).…”