The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: word recognition in English and German children

Groups of 7, 8, and 9-year-old children who were learning to read in English and German were given three different continuous reading tasks: a numeral reading task, a number word reading task, and a nonsense word reading task. The nonsense words could be read by analogy to the number words. Whereas reading time and error rates in numeral and number word reading were very similar across the two orthographies, the German children showed a big advantage in reading the nonsense words. This pattern of results is interpreted as evidence for the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition in the two orthographies. German children appear to rely on assembling pronunciations via grapheme-phoneme conversion, and English children appear to rely more on some kind of direct recognition strategy. A model of reading development that takes account of orthographic consistency is proposed.