Overview

The learning of reading skills is causally related to some properties of the language itself. Transparent or consistent alphabetic languages, such as Spanish, map most easily from orthography to sounds, with one-to-one correspondence from letters to phonemes. Inconsistent orthographies, such as English, show instead a greater mismatch between orthography and phonology. A pre-reading child detects small units within syllables in his spoken vocabulary, units comprised of onset and rime. Analyzing speech into these components is central to phonological awareness, the ability to analyze speech into its component sounds. Reading in an alphabetic language requires relating letters to sound units that are smaller than onset and rime, units called phonemes. Goswami argues that children learn phonemes through mastering the orthography (letters in combination) of their language. To master the code relating written letters to spoken sounds, children need more time for languages with inconsistent orthography, even when they do not have dyslexia. Dyslexic children of all languages have greater trouble learning letter-sound relationships, typically because of poor representation of sounds, which can be investigated in both behavior and brain imaging. Electrical potentials from cortical activity evoked by sounds and other stimuli indicate that the auditory systems of dyslexic children seem to be more immature than those of normal children. This kind of research combining both behavior and brain activity to analyze reading is one of the areas that is most likely to produce important knowledge relevant for schooling in the near future.

The Editors