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Reading science, over its long history, has built a solid knowledge base about the necessary components and processes for literacy acquisition and skilled reading. Yet the foundational research in reading science is primarily based on English literacy skills. More recent research focuses on a wider range of languages and script types, thus offering the opportunity to refine our understanding of literacy development, and to identify universal versus language-specific principles. Western views emphasize the central role of
phonological awareness to reading development and impairment, while morphological awareness is highlighted to play a dominant role in learning non-alphabetic languages, like Chinese. These metalinguistic skills along with linguistic knowledge about vocabulary and syntax are universally necessary for reading – indeed, there is an overlap in brain networks for speech and literacy that is found across languages. But learning to read also involves a new interface that maps the writing system onto spoken language. Orthographic knowledge about this mapping system is fundamental, yet may show more variation across scripts because writing systems vary in the way they map print to speech. Therefore, a focus of my research has been on orthographic knowledge for contrastive writing systems. In this talk I will share our work investigating spelling patterns by biliterate children learning English plus another alphabetic script (Malay), an akshara alphasyllabary (Tamil), or a morphosyllabic script (Chinese). We will explore questions about spelling development, and whether and how it is affected by the structural features of different writing systems. Discussion will also be opened up about the implications for education and assessment.
