ABSTRACT
Research on the typical and atypical development of language and language-related skills has historically focused on a small subset of the world’s languages. Relatively recently, the potential gains of completing research in a greater range of languages and the avoidable pitfalls of focusing on too narrow a set of languages without carefully considering language choice and its effect on research results have been realized. Realization is just the beginning. In order to fully understand the processes involved in spoken and written language, a tremendous amount of cross-linguistic research is needed. Attention to this issue is well underway in the study of spoken language and has begun in the area of reading. However, the development of writing skills and the manifestation of writing disabilities (WD) remain underexplored in many of the world’s languages and orthographies.
