Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results con rm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and uent in foundation level reading before the end of the rst school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to differences in age of starting or letter knowledge. It is argued that fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible. Syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding, whereas orthographic depth affects both word reading and nonword reading. The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow as in the shallow orthographies. It is hypothesized that the deeper orthographies induce the implementation of a dual (logographic + alphabetic) foundation which takes more than twice as long to establish as the single foundation required for the learning of a shallow orthography. There has been much recent attention to the possibility that the ease of reading acquisition may vary between languages because of differences in 'orthographic depth' (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987 between English, which is regarded as a deep orthography containing many inconsistencies and complexities, and other alphabetic European languages, several of which have shallow orthographies with consistent grapheme -phoneme correspondences. For example, Wimmer and Goswami (1994) compared reading of digits, number names and nonwords formed by exchanging the onsets and rimes of number names by 7-, 8-and 9-year-old children in German and English. Nonword reading was signi cantly slower and more error prone in English at all three age levels. Frith, Wimmer, and Landerl (1998) used structurally equivalent sets of 1-, 2-and 3-syllable nonwords in English and German and again found consistently poorer nonword reading in English. Similar data are reported for comparisons of English with Spanish and French by Goswami, Gombert, and de Barrera (1998) and with Greek by Goswami, Porpodas, and Wheelwright (1997) . These studies suggest that the decoding process, which is commonly assigned a central role in theoretical accounts of reading acquisition (Ehri, 1992; Gough & Hillinger, 1980; Share, 1995) , develops more slowly and less effectively in English than in other European languages. The present study extends this work to a comparison of English with a wider range of European languages and also seeks to determine the stage in reading acquisition at which the orthographic depth effect becomes evident. The theoretical context is provided by the foundation literacy framework developed by Seymour (1990 Seymour ( , 1997 Seymour ( , 1999 . This proposes that reading is acquired in phases, such that basic foundational components are established in Phase 1 while the complexities of orthographic and morphographic structure are internalized in Phases 2 and 3. A simpli ed version of the model is shown in Fig. 1 . The foundation consists of two processes, a logographic process involved in the identi cation and storage of familiar words, and an alphabetic process which supports sequential decoding. Both of these processes are held to be dependent on the availability of letter-sound knowledge (Ehri, 1992 (Ehri, , 1997 ). In their turn, the foundations underpin the development of an orthographic framework in which the full complexity of the spelling system is represented in an abstract generalizable format (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996) . Reading acquisition is paralleled by developments in linguistic awareness. It is supposed that small units (phonemes) are emphasized during Phase 1 and larger units (rimes, syllables, morphemes) during Phases 2 and 3. Seymour and Evans (1999) devised simple procedures for the measurement of the components of foundation literacy. These were: (1) giving sounds for individual letters and writing letters in response to their sounds (letter knowledge); (2) reading very familiar words (logographic foundation); and (3) reading aloud and writing to dictation simple CVC nonwords (alphabetic foundation). The procedures were applied to unselected groups of Scottish children in the Primary 1 year (age 5 years) and in the Primary 2 year (age 6 years). Letter-sound knowledge was found to be complete before the end of the rst school year. Development of the logographic and alphabetic foundations was closely linked to reading age and advanced towards an asymptote at about 7 years of reading age. A further delay of one or more years was found among samples of children drawn from disadvantaged (low SES) areas (Duncan & Seymour, 2000) . The simple model set out in Fig. 1 suggests two hypotheses regarding the relationship between foundation literacy acquisition and the orthographic complexity of the language which is being learned. One possibility is that foundation acquisition precedes the formation of an orthographic framework. If so, we could expect to nd that the development of the foundation components occurred in an approximately equivalent way in the different languages and that the effects of orthographic complexity emerged only later when the orthographic framework was formed. Alternatively, it could be that the presence of orthographic complexity exerts effects from the very beginning of learning to read. In this case, foundation literacy acquisition would be expected to advance more slowly in deep orthographies than in shallow orthographies. The study aims to test for differences in rates of acquisition of the components of foundation literacy in European languages which vary signi cantly in orthographic complexity. This variation has not yet been submitted to a comprehensive computational linguistic analysis (but see Peereman & Content, 1997 , 1999 Ziegler, Jacobs, & Stone, 1996; Ziegler, Stone, & Jacobs, 1997 , for steps in this direction). Nonetheless, there is agreement that some European orthographies are relatively shallow (Finnish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German) while others are deeper in the sense of containing more inconsistent correspondences as well as morphological in uences on spelling (Portuguese, French, Danish, English). The opportunity to carry out the study was provided by an EC network (COSTAction A8) which brought together researchers from 16 European countries who shared an interest in reading acquisition and dyslexia (Niessen, Frith, Reitsma, & Ö hngren, 2000) . One part of this cooperation entailed a review of the characteristics of the European orthographies which were thought likely to affect reading acquisition. On this basis, it was proposed that it should be possible to classify the orthographies on the twin dimensions of (1) syllabic complexity, and (2) orthographic depth. The rst dimension refers principally to the distinction between the Romance languages, which have a predominance of open CV syllables with few initial or nal consonant clusters (e.g. Italian, Spanish), and the Germanic languages, which have numerous closed CVC syllables and complex consonant clusters in both onset and coda position (e.g. German, Danish, English). The orthographic depth dimension contrasts alphabetic European orthographies 145 writing systems which approximate a consistent 1:1 mapping between letters and phonemes (e.g. Finnish) with those which contain orthographic inconsistencies and complexities, including multi-letter graphemes, context dependent rules, irregularities, and morphological effects (e.g. French, Danish). Table 1 identi es the languages involved in the research and sets out a hypothetical classi cation of the orthographies in terms of the dimensions of syllabic complexity and orthographic depth. 1 The expectation is that the dif culty of acquiring literacy will increase as one moves from simple to complex syllabic structures, and from shallow towards deep orthographies. Hence, if linguistic complexity affects the foundation phase of acquisition, it is hypothesized that the initial steps in reading will be traversed more rapidly in languages with simple syllabic structure than in languages with complex syllabic structure, and that acquisition will be slower in deeper orthographies than in shallow orthographies. The collaborators coordinated the preparation of test materials and the collection and coding of the data according to guidelines agreed by the COST A8 group. The group aimed to make formally equivalent assessments in each of the participating languages of the components of foundation literacy identi ed by Seymour and Evans (1999). There were three sets of lists designed to assess: (1) letter knowledge; (2) very familiar word identi cation; and (3) decoding of simple nonwords (see Appendix). Frost et al. (1987, p. 104) Letter knowledge Two lists of the letters of the alphabet printed in clear lower case font were assembled for each language. The letters were displayed in vertical columns on A4 sheets. Sets of very familiar high frequency words were sampled from the reading materials used in the early stage of primary schooling in each language. Two sets were compiled: (1) two lists of content words (principally imageable nouns), and (2) two lists of function words (grammatical morphemes). Each set was presented as two separate lists of nine items vertically arranged on A4 sheets. The items selected for the deeper orthographies were permitted to contain orthographically complex features (diacritics, multi-letter graphemes, irregularities). Two sets of nonwords were constructed for each language, one consisting of monosyllables and using the structures CV, VC and CVC, and the other of bisyllables formed from the structures VCV, CVCV and VCVC. Two separate lists were prepared for both lengths, each containing nine items vertically arranged on A4 sheets. The nonwords were formed by sampling dominant and consistent grapheme -phoneme (1 letter, 1 sound) correspondences in each language and included no complex structures. 2 Each of the three reading tasks was introduced by presentation of six practice items and an explanation. For letters, children were asked to pronounce the names or sounds (depending which was emphasized by the local educational system) of each item. For familiar words, they were asked to read out each item on the list. In the case of nonwords, they were told that the items were made-up words which they might, nonetheless, be able to pronounce. The lists were presented in a xed sequence (letters, familiar words, nonwords). Testing was carried out individually. Vocal responses in reading the complete sequence of nine items on each list were tape recorded for subsequent checking and categorization. A stop watch was started when the list was presented to the child and stopped when the last item had been attempted. If a child was blocked by a particular item he or she was encouraged to move on and complete the list. Foundation literacy acquisition in English was tested in two groups of children attending primary schools in the city of Dundee on the east coast of Scotland. Children in Group 1 attended a school located in a predominantly middle class (high SES) area of the city. The sample included Primary 1 children aged 5 years and Primary 2 children aged 6 years. Group 2 was drawn from a school located in a socially disadvantaged (low SES) area of the city. Primary 3 children, aged 7 years, were tested in addition to P1 and P2 groups. Reading ages were determined for the high SES sample by applying the word recognition subtest of the British Abilities Scale (BAS) (Elliot, 1987) . A comparison of the P1 and P2 results con rmed that there was a large advantage in reading accuracy for the high SES group over the low SES group, with F(1, 116) = 18.14, p < .001 for letters, F(1, 233) = 43.05, p < .001 for familiar content and function words, and F(1, 233) = 16.15, p < .001 for monosyllabic and bisyllabic nonwords. However, differences between the high SES P1 and P2 groups and the low SES P2 and P3 groups were not signi cant. These results agree with previous indications that low SES is associated with a delay in letter-sound acquisition and a consequent lag of about 1 year in the development of the logographic and alphabetic foundation processes (Duncan & Seymour, 2000) . Given this effect, we will restrict the comparison between English and the other European orthographies to the high SES Scottish group. Table 2 provides details of the P1 and P2 sample sizes, and the chronological ages and BAS reading ages at the time of testing. Both groups were reading well ahead of age expectation. The comparison between English and other orthographies is based on a sample of children who are not held back by social disadvantage and who are making excellent progress according to UK norms. Table 2 identi es the simple syllable and complex syllable European orthographies and shows the sample sizes and average ages at the time of testing. 3 Samples were recruited from effective schools in non-deprived areas in each country. The participants were enrolled in Grade 1 (P1) classes and were tested in the latter part of their rst school year. In addition, Grade 2 (P2) groups participated in France and Denmark as well as in Scotland. The mean ages of the samples varied in line with national differences in the age of commencement of formal schooling. The Scottish P1 children entered school at 5 years and were younger than any other group. The groups learning to read complex syllable languages were slightly older than the groups learning simple syllable languages (89 vs. 85 months, F(1, 531) = 57.83, p < .001). Within the simple syllable set, the Finnish group, aged 94 months, was differentiated from all other groups, 80-84 months, F(5, 247) = 126.70, p < .001. There were also differences between the complex syllable languages, with the main group averaging 82-91 months and the Norwegian children signi cantly older at 95 months (F(6, 273) = 38.03, p < .001). The relationship between chronological age and performance on the foundation literacy tasks was determined in a correlational analysis. Table 3 gives the values of Pearson r between the ages of all Grade 1 children at the time of testing and the accuracy and time scores for reading letters, familiar words and simple nonwords. The correlations were calculated with and without inclusion of the Scottish P1 sample. With the Scottish data excluded, the overall indication is that foundation literacy is not strongly related to age. Nonword reading was independent of age and the relationships with letter accuracy and word reading speed, although signi cant, are very weak. Inclusion of the results for the younger Scottish children increases the strength of the correlations with age quite substantially, especially for performance on the word reading task. Note. Participants were enrolled in Grade 1 (P1) classes and were tested in the latter part of their rst school year. Grade 2 (P2) groups also participated in France, Denmark and Scotland. There was an equal balance of male and female participants. Tests were made of the effects of gender on each of the foundation literacy measures but no signi cant differences were obtained (F usually < 1). European orthographies 149 This preliminary analysis indicates that foundation literacy acquisition by non-English European groups is not affected by gender and is largely independent of variations in the ages at which children commence formal schooling. Table 4 reports the accuracy (per cent correct) and speed (s/item) of letter identi cation by each language group. A three-step analysis of the data was followed: (1) results for simple syllable and complex syllable languages (Scottish excluded) were compared in order to determine whether syllabic complexity in uenced lettersound learning; (2) results for the individual languages within the simple and complex series were contrasted in order to test for an effect of orthographic depth; (3) the Scottish data were compared with the other languages as a test of a special dif culty in English. STUDY 1: LETTER-SOUND KNOWLEDGE An analysis of variance was conducted to compare languages with simple syllabic structure against languages with complex syllabic structure (Grade 1 groups only). The hypothesis that letter learning might be delayed in complex syllable languages was not 03 (0.27) supported. Accuracy was slightly higher in complex than in simple syllable languages (96%vs. 94% ), F(1, 553) = 13.84, p < .001. Further analyses were conducted to test for differences between languages within each series. There was a variation between 91 and 96% among the simple syllable languages, F(5, 269) = 3.4, p < .01, with French and Portuguese at the lower end and Spanish and Greek at the higher end. The variation among complex syllable languages was slightly wider (89 -99% ), F(6, 273) = 15.85, p < .001, with Dutch picked out as the language with the lowest accuracy level. The outcome for the Scottish P1 group was then compared with the results for all other languages. The language effect was signi cant, F(13, 571) = 7.65, p < .001, but this was not attributable to an outlying result for English. Post hoc tests identi ed four overlapping sets of scores. The Scottish result (94% ) was embedded in the main series and was better than Dutch, French or Portuguese. Table 4 gives information about the speed of letter identi cation in each language. The preliminary analysis (with English excluded) suggested that letter identi cation was slower (1.24 s/item) in simple than in complex syllable (0.96 s/item) languages, F(1, 522) = 52.01, p < .001. This effect is again in the wrong direction with respect to the syllabic complexity hypothesis. There were inter-language differences within the simple syllable series, F(5, 238) = 8.64, p < .001, and within the complex syllable series, F(6, 273) = 17.24, p < .001. Post hoc (Scheffe ) tests identi ed French, Portuguese and Finnish as the slower subgroup in the rst series, and Danish and Swedish in the second series. Naming time per letter was slower in the Scottish P1 group (1.88 s/item) than in any other language. An analysis of variance indicated that this effect was signi cant in relation to the complex syllable languages, where F(7, 302) = 25.19, p < .001, and post hoc tests differentiated the Scottish outcome from Swedish (1.36 s/item). There are variations between languages in the ef ciency of letter-sound acquisition during the rst school year. However, all groups achieve a mastery level of 90% or better on average and there is no strong support for the conclusion that learning is affected by the linguistic factors of syllabic complexity or orthographic depth. In particular, the complexity of the English orthography did not appear to have delayed the acquisition of letter-sound knowledge in the high SES Scottish P1 sample. There were differences in speed of letter identi cation. Most groups demonstrated a high level of uency, quanti able as a rate of about 1 s/item, but speeds were slightly slower in some languages. Again, the variations were not obviously attributable to contrasts in syllabic complexity or orthographic depth. There was no general association between uency and chronological age in European groups aged 6 years and above. However, naming speed was slower in the Scottish P1 sample than in any other language. This dys uency could be an effect of immaturity in Scottish children who commence formal learning at an earlier age (5 years) than any of the other language groups. Table 5 summarizes the accuracy and time data for reading lists of very familiar words. Overall, the accuracy level was 90%(Scottish data excluded). An analysis of variance indicated that there was no general difference between content and function words, F(1, 1107) < 1. The distinction affected reading speed, with content words somewhat slower than function words (2.02 s/item vs. 1.7 s/item), F(1, 1043) = 6.79, p < .01, probably due to length differences between the two sets of items. Results for the two word sets were combined in the subsequent analyses which followed the same three-step approach as was adopted for the letters. European orthographies 151 STUDY 2: FAMILIAR WORDS A preliminary analysis was carried out on the European data with English excluded. Ranges within the simple and complex syllable languages were similar (74-98%for simple, 71-98%for complex) and the overall difference between the series was not signi cant, F(1, 553) < 1. There was a large variation among the simple syllable languages, F(5, 269) = 25.62, p < .001. This effect occurred because accuracy in French and Portuguese (< 80% ) was signi cantly lower according to Scheffe post hoc tests than in any of the other languages (> 90% ). The variation was also signi cant in the complex syllable languages, F(6, 273) = 21.94, p < .001, due to the low accuracy in Danish (71% ). Word reading accuracy by the Scottish P1 sample (34% ) fell far below the range of the other languages. Language differences with Scottish included were highly signicant, F(13, 571) = 47.99, p < .001. According to post hoc Scheffe tests, the Scottish P1 mean was signi cantly below the results for Danish, Portuguese and French, which were, in turn, differentiated from the outcomes for all remaining languages. The Scottish P2 results formed a subset with Danish, Portuguese and French (< 80% accuracy). These data suggest that competence in familiar word reading approaches mastery much more slowly in English than in other European orthographies. At the end of the rst school year, accuracy is typically> 90%in the majority of languages and > 70%in the deeper orthographies. Danish children require an additional year to exceed the 90% threshold. English-speaking children remain well below this level even after two years of learning. An alternative way of expressing this trend is to consider the relationship with reading age. Within the Scottish sample overall (P1 and P2 combined), there was a strong association between BAS reading age and accuracy of familiar word reading, with r = + .86, p < .01. The test for a linear trend in the data was highly signi cant, F(1, 59) = 397.22, p < .001. The function relating the two variables had a slope of 2.49 percentage points accuracy for each month of reading age. On this basis, it was possible to calculate that the Scottish group crosses a 90%threshold at a reading age of nearly 8 years. However, the sample included a few children (N= 5) who had very high reading ages (> 96 months). The presence of these cases reduces the slope of the regression line and increases the reading age at which the threshold is crossed. A reanalysis with the advanced readers excluded produced the function graphed in Fig. 2 . This shows the scatter of the data and the regression line for word naming accuracy against reading age. The 90%threshold is crossed at a reading age of 7 years 4 months.
On the other hand, Spanish has a shallow orthography with a more regular alphabetic system that contains consistent mappings between letters and sounds, the second shallowest of European languages REF .
Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies
British journal of psychology
British journal of psychology
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