ABSTRACT
The ‘learning problem’ faced by a child acquiring reading is similar across languages, even though a striking variety of rather different symbol systems have been invented to represent spoken language. These symbol systems include alphabetic systems like English and Italian, and character-based systems like Japanese and Chinese. We call these visual codes for spoken language orthographies, and the efficient use of these visual codes reading. Efficient readers can look at pages of symbols and understand the communicative messages intended by the writers of the symbols.
