ABSTRACT
We know that learning to read requires mastering the system by which print encodes the language (i.e., the orthography; Adams, 1990; Rieben & Perfetti, 1991), and that such mastery entails understanding how the spoken language works. In alphabetic languages such as English, Spanish, and Dutch, this means understanding that speech contains units that in turn map onto orthographic units. There seems to be convergence among researchers as to subtle steps in the development of early reading skills by young children (Ehri, 1991; Perfetti, 1992). For instance, Gough, Juel, and Griffith (1992) argued that the child first comes to recognize words by a process of selective visual association, before shifting to
1983; Tzeng & Wang, 1983). According to the orthographic depth hypothesis (Feldman & Turvey, 1983), prelexical phonology plays a more important role in lexical access in shallow orthographies that have a direct and consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence than in deep orthographies, where the mapping of letters to sounds is less straightforward.
