ABSTRACT
Most research on reading and spelling acquisition has been conducted in the English language (see Perfetti, 1994). This state of affairs poses a problem because developmental sequences seem to depend partially on the specific characteristics of languages and orthographies rather than exclusively on the general principles common to all languages (see Frost, 1994). For example, the comparisons between the acquisition of reading in English and in German, a language more transparent than English at the level of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, show that German-speaking children use phonological mediation even at the very beginning of reading acquisition, without passing through a logographic stage of nonanalytic, direct visual processing (Wimmer & Goswami, 1994); it is not necessarily the case for English-speaking children (Wimmer & Goswami). Therefore, it is important to examine reading-and spelling-acquisition in French, a language that, similar to German, has a written system less opaque than English.
