Recent advances on the role of orthographies on reading and dyslexia: universal or script specific processes?

A growing body of evidence based on monolingual and bilingual research shows that normal and impaired reading is influenced by orthographic transparency. That is, the relationship between orthography and phonology in a given writing system plays an important role in the extent to which reading impairments are manifest in that script. Of particular interest are alphabetic writing systems in which orthography to phonology mappings are mainly regular and thus predictable. In this talk I will briefly review this evidence with the view to present recent findings from normal and impaired reading in a totally transparent alphabetic orthography, namely Turkish. Results will be discussed within cognitive and neuropsychological perspectives on dyslexia in bilingual contexts.