Cambridge University Press Learning to Read and Write: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective: 2 (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development, Series Number 2)

For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts - whether they have less regularity in their grapheme-phoneme correspondences or do not make use of alphabetic symbols at all - it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even non-existent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master. Review "This book provides us with abundant evidence that across a wide range of countries and across the full gamut of reading systems, there is a very close relationship between how easy it is to learn to read and how well the writing system being acquired permits nonlexical print-to-sound translation. Why should this be so? The self-teaching hypothesis provides an appealing answer to this question; hence, the data reported in this book provide strong evidence that this hypothesis is correct." Contemporary Psychology, APA Review of Books Book Description Cross-linguistic perspective on how children learn to read and write in different languages and scripts.