Introduction to this Special Issue on Reading and its Development across Orthographies: State of the Science

Recent research has brought about important theoretical issues that are relevant to the study of reading and its development. To begin with, there is evidence that both universal and particular principles underly reading processes, processes of learning to read and its precursors. There is also evidence for variability in reading and spelling of words and that this variability may be associated with variation in relevant precursor measures and in general principles of learning like statistical learning, linguistic characteristics like processing of prosodic information, and genetic principles. The research that has established these observations has focused mainly on alphabetic orthographies, particularly English. However, there have been suggestions from studies in other languages that learning to read may differ across languages and writing systems. We think that now the time is right to bring together this expertise in this special issue, presenting a collection of reviews on recent research on learning to read across languages and writing systems, with a special focus on cross-language and cross-writing system perspectives.