ABSTRACT
In the May 2009 edition of New Scientist, Andrew Robinson wrote about trying to decipher ancient lost languages. He stated that ‘Writing is one of the greatest inventions in human history. . . . Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science-and of course no books, newspapers or internet.’ However, writing is no use if we are not able to read it. To decipher an ancient script, experts need to be able to link what they discover through archaeology with a known language, or at least one with which they are familiar. The research presented in this book shows that children learning to read are going through a similar deciphering process. Furthermore, the way that they learn to read is determined in no small part by the writing system that they are trying to decode. Even as adult skilled readers, the way that we read is constrained by the nature of the written code that we use.
