Processes involved in learning to read in a transparent alphabetic orthography: evidence from good and poor beginner readers of Turkish.

Turkish is an atypically transparent orthography in which translations between print and sound are one-to-one for both feed-back and feed-forward processes. Despite its extreme transparency skilled reading in Turkish has been reported to be influenced by lexical factors such as frequency. It is of importance to establish whether beginner readers of Turkish also utilise lexical information in attaining phonology from print in reading tasks. Word imageability is of particular interest here as it has been reported to influence naming accuracy in poor readers of English. It is hypothesized that in the total absence of ambiguous representations between orthography and phonology imageability will not have an impact on naming accuracy on poor beginner readers of Turkish. The implication of findings which support this prediction will be discussed in view of impaired reading development as a function of orthographic transparency.

Symposium on ‘Developmental dyslexia in different languages and orthographies’ convened by Professor Hua Shu.