ABSTRACT
Languages around the world vary greatly in their structure as well as in how they represent the spoken language in their written form. Commonalities and differences in literacy development across the languages can help us distinguish between universal and language-specific aspects of this vital cognitive process. In this chapter, I focus on the properties of oral and written Turkish and how these properties affect literacy development of children as well as that of adults. Turkish, a member of the Altaic language family, is quite different from the Indo-European languages that have been studied most frequently in literacy research. It can therefore provide us with a different window to literacy development.
