Development of Reading Efficiency in First and Second Language

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Development of ReadingEfficiency in First andSecond LanguageEsther Geva , Lesly Wade-Woolley & MichalShanyPublished online: 19 Nov 2009.

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SCIENTIPIC STUDIES OF READING, 1(2), 119-144 Copyright 0 1997, Lawrence Fxlbaum Associates, Inc.

Development of Reading Efficiency in First and Second Language

Esther Geva ~ntario' Institute for Studies in Education-University of Toronto

Lesly Wade-Woolley University of British Columbia

Michal Shany Tel-Aviv University and Beit Berl Teachers College

Efficiency in basic reading processes can be discussed in terms of accuracy and speed. In this longitudinal study, the development of accurate and fast reading processes was studied in a group of 66 children learning to read simultaneously in English, their first language (Ll), and Hebrew, their second language (L2). Children's speed and accuracy were compared in Grade 1 and Grade 2 on parallel L1 and L2 tasks of letter naming, reading isolated words and the same words in text. Results indicated that corresponding accuracy and speed across the two languages are highly correlated. Despite differences in language familiarity and different orthographies, accuracy and speed rates of isolated word reading in L1 and L2 were highly similar. Yet, in L1, children were more efficient (faster and more accurate) in reading text than isolated words, but in early stages of L2 reading acquisition, text reading was not more efficient than the reading of isolated words. In terms of efficiency components in L2 language, accuracy distinguished good from poor L2 readers, but speed did not. It is concluded that (a) steps associated with the development of L1 reading efficiency (i.e., accuracy attained before speed) are applicable to the development of word recognition skills in L2, but they do not emerge concurrently in both languages and (b) specific linguistic features such as orthographic depth and morphosyntactic complexity may interact with more global L2 proficiency effects in determining the course of L2 reading skills development.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Esther Geva, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education-University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1V6. E-mail: [email protected]

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1 20 GEVA, WADE-WOOLLEY, SHANY

Theories and research of reading efficiency contribute to our understanding of phases in the development of word recognition speed and accuracy, as well as to our understanding of the relative processing efficiency of letters, isolated words, inflected words, and connected text. They also help to clarify the source of differences between good and poor readers. The importance of reading efficiency involving accuracy and speed in processing words and word components has been the focus of theories of automaticity (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974) and verbal efficiency (Perfetti, 1985,1992). These theories address the relation between lexical processes and comprehension and suggest that to enhance comprehension, lexical access processes need to be executed efficiently and automatically, so as not to overtax processing resources (Bowers, Golden, Kennedy, & Young, 1994; Bowers & Wolf, 1993; Carver, 1990; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1992; Wolf, Pfeil, Lotz, & Biddle, 1994). According to these theories, skilled readers have rapid access to the naming codes, and speed of naming in both continuous and discrete presentation paradigms reliably differentiates good from poor readers (Fawcett & Nicolson, 1994). Studies on the speed of naming various stimuli such as digits, colors, letters, and words indicate that speed of letter and word naming are good predictors of fluent reading. Overall, less skilled readers are described in the reading literature as recognizing printed words more slowly than skilled readers (Biemiller, 1977178; Carver, 1992; Curtis & Glaser, 1983; Denckla & Rudel, 1976; Ehri, 1986; Ehri & Wilce, 1983; Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1986).

Biemiller (1977178) suggested a theoretical framework to analyze differences between the time required to identify and name an equal number of letters and words. His research showed that as children move from kindergarten to sixth grade, the time required to identify letters is reduced from approximately 1.5 sec per letter to .5 sec per letter. According to Biemiller, fast reading of words reflects the child's ability to use orthographic information accurately and efficiently. Words are rarely read faster than letters but can be read more slowly. If the speed of reading simple words out of context is slower than the speed of reading letters, then the child is an inefficient reader. A number of studies conducted with children learning to read English, their first language (Ll), point to a positive link between speed of letter and word identification and reading comprehension (Biemiller, 1977178; Ehri & Wilce, 1983; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Feeman, 1984).

Most studies concerned with the development of second language (L2) reading proficiency focus on accuracy, and to date, very few L2 studies have examined the development of the speed component of reading efficiency. Furthermore, those studies that examined the development of L2 reading efficiency involved literate adult readers, who typically acquire their L1 and L2 reading skills sequentially (e.g., Segalowitz, 1986; Shimron & Sivan, 1994; Sun, 1992). Nevertheless, these studies provide evidence that the activation of the mental lexicon is slower in L2 than in L1. For instance, Favreau, Komoda, and Segalowitz (1980) found that adult English-French highly bilingual speakers had slower naming rates in their L2 even

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DEVELOPMENT OF READING EFFICIENCY 1 2 1

though they were highly accurate on listening and reading comprehension tasks in their L1 and L2. When these bilingual adults were given more time to respond in their L2, they were able to use orthographic information more accurately. Such results suggest that in considering the development of reading skills in L2 it is not enough to focus on accuracy indices, and such studies should not be restricted to literate adults learning to read in another language. Rather, a comprehensive theory of L2 reading development should address age-based potential differences in L2 reading development. It should also address the development of fast and efficient reading processes and the cognitive demands presented by accurate but inefficient execution of component processes in L2 reading.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF READING SKILLS IN L2

Ehri (1995, 1996) proposed that L1 sight word recognition processes develop in four subtle steps. In the first stage, which Ehri called pre-alphabetic, beginning readers recognize words on the basis of selective associations founded on the words' visual characteristics. In the second partial alphabetic stage, novice readers begin to form associations between some but not all of the letters in printed words and their sound equivalents. This leads to the third, or full alphabetic phase, where readers are able to use their full knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences. As a result of practice, familiar words then come to be recognized in the fourth, or consolidated alphabetic phase, automatically as wholes, and larger spelling units such as onset-rhyme divisions take the place of individual letter-sound relations in decoding new words. Ehri (1986) pointed out that for skilled readers, the stored orthographic information is more easily available, and the whole process is faster. However, the availability of that information has to be distinguished from the actual use of that knowledge as reflected in the word recognition process. Differences in availability and utilization of orthographic information may appear more dramatic in the development of literacy in an L2.

In the absence of a comprehensive theory of L2 reading development, researchers concerned with the development of L2 reading skills tend to rely on L1 theoretical frameworks. This practice reflects the often unstated assumption that L2 reading development comprises component processes that are similar or identical to those identified and studied in L1. It also entails the assumption that individual differences in underlying cognitive processes that have been discussed in the L1 literature as driving the development of Ll reading skills (e.g., working memory, speed of lexical access) should be equally relevant when one studies the development of L2 reading (Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin, 1993; Geva, Wade-Woolley, & Shany, 1993). These assumptions of universality, albeit logical, need to be examined experimentally.

A number of factors may affect the extent to which L1 reading development theories can be applied injudiciously to theories of L2 reading development. For

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122 GEVA, WADE-WOOLLEY, SHANY

example, much of the research on reading development has been based on beginning readers with English as L1. However, languages vary in their orthographic, lexical, and morphosyntactic complexity (Katz & Frost, 1992). Due to such differences, one cannot assume that component reading processes (Carr & Levy, 1990) play the same role or carry the same weights across orthographies. Further- more, L2 oral proficiency may affect oral and written language tasks differently (Chitiri, Sun, Willows, & Taylor, 1992; Durgunoglu et al., 1993). For example, comprehension-based processes may benefit from the facilitation of increasing levels of L2 oral proficiency involving phonological, lexical, and syntactic skills (Carroll, 1981; Geva & Ryan, 1993). However, recent research suggests that in alphabetic languages, accurate execution of basic reading processes may be less sensitive to lexical and syntactic skills, but may be differentially affected by differences in the complexity of writing systems (Chitiri et al., 1992; Geva & Wade-Woolley , 1994).

Writing systems can be classified into two categories-morphography (or logography), used in languages such as Chinese, and phonography (or phonetic script), used in languages such as English and Russian (Koda, 1989). Some researchers argue that visual, phonological, and semantic differences entail different demands on word recognition processes in different languages (Chen, 1992; Feldman, 1987; Frost & Bentin, 1992; Geva & Siegel, 1991; Koda, 1989; Shimron, 1993; Taylor & Taylor, 1983; Tzeng & Wang, 1983). According to the orthographic depth hypothesis (Feldman & Turvey, 1983), prelexical phonology plays a more important role in lexical access in shallow orthographies, which have a direct and consistent grapheme to phoneme correspondence, than in deep orthographies, where the mapping of letters to sounds is less often isomorphic.

Emerging evidence suggests that the rate of acquisition of basic reading skills is not identical across different orthographies, and that it may be affected by orthographic complexity (Geva & Siegel, 1991; Geva et al., 1993; Gholamain, 1992). For example, in two separate studies, Geva and her colleagues found that word recognition and word attack skills in L1 (English) and L2 (Hebrew) were found to be highly correlated, but accuracy rate and the type of decoding errors children made in L1 and L2 were orthography-specific. Surprisingly, children reached a higher decoding accuracy rate earlier in Hebrew, their L2, than in English, their L1. The authors maintain that these differences reflect the fact that learning to decode voweled Hebrew is less challenging than learning to decode English, because voweled Hebrew is relatively shallow (Katz & Frost, 1992).

Another aspect of orthographic complexity that has not been addressed suffi- ciently across different writing systems, or in L2-based reading research, concerns the effects of inflectional morphology on the development of reading efficiency. The contribution of higher order morphosyntactic processes to orthographic knowledge is relevant to English, but it may play a more central role in the growth of orthographic knowledge in highly inflected languages such as French, Dutch, and

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DEVELOPMENT OF READING EFFICIENCY 123

Hebrew. Assink and Kattenberg (1994) showed that the ability of Dutch children to integrate syntactic information with spelling accuracy increases gradually with age and that higher order oral language processes contribute to orthographic knowledge. Relatedly, Shirnron and Sivan (1994) showed that the resources required to "unpack" inflected words in Hebrew text exert a powerful influence on the reading of Hebrew by adult native speakers. The formation of letter-sound correspondences in a shallow orthography such as voweled Hebrew or Serbo-Croa- tian may be less demanding to L2 learners. Yet, the inflectional system may hamper the efficient execution of higher level morphosyntactic components. In other words, in shallow orthographies such as Serbo-Croatian or voweled Hebrew, simple decoding may be less demanding and therefore present little challenge to young learners or to L2 learners. At the same time, learners of these languages may find the requirement to unpack and coordinate word-based orthographic, lexical, and morphosyntactic information more taxing than learners of other, less inflected languages. The research reported in this article examined these questions by studying the development of reading efficiency in a group of children who were learning to read simultaneously in English, their L1, and Hebrew, their L2 over a 2-year period. For ease of reference, the next section includes a brief overview of Hebrew orthography.

HEBREW ORTHOGRAPHY

Hebrew (like English) orthography is alphabetic in nature, but is read from right to left. Unlike English, Hebrew orthography (in its vowelized form) can be described as "shallow" in that there is a direct and systematic correspondence between the 22 consonants and the associated phonemes. Hebrew vowels in the form of dots and dashes ("points") are placed below, above, to the left, or within the consonants. In Hebrew, the number of syllables in a word corresponds to the number of vowels in the word.

It is a common practice to omit vowels from texts designed for fluent readers, but children and L2 learners learn to read first with the vowels intact (Berman, 1978; Katz & Frost, 1992). When vowels are present, the pronunciation of syllables in Hebrew is transparent and involves very few exceptions associated with specific letter strings, position in the word, and vowel combinations. For this reason, accurate word decoding in Hebrew can be learned easily and can be executed in a linear right-to-left fashion (Geva & Siegel, 1991). Because decoding is highly systematic and linear, it is possible to learn how to decode accurately in Hebrew without having any proficiency in the language. This does not mean, of course, that lexical, syntactic, and semantic information do not contribute to speed of lexical access and to comprehension (Shimron & Navon, 1982).

Although learning to decode voweled Hebrew is less demanding than learning to decode English, gaining accuracy and speed over the morphosyntactic levels

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should be fairly challenging to L1 and L2 learners alike. Hebrew verbs are inflected for number, gender, tense, and aspect. Prefixes and suffixes are added to noun phrases to indicate case. Likewise, information typically conveyed in English by prepositions appears in prefixes or suffixes. As the following examples illustrate, each Hebrew "word" includes a different number of morphemes (and syllables). The word bayit means "(a) home," habayit means "the home," bebayit means "in (a) home," and babayit means "in the home." By contrast, in written English, each of these nouns, articles, and prepositions is represented by a separate word. Due to such differences, comparing the development of accurate and fast reading languages varying in their morphemic density is theoretically challenging and experimentally a difficult task: It is not clear whether the processing of graphophonemic, semantic, and morphosyntactic levels are similar across languages, and it is not clear whether parallel L1 and L2 tasks should be equated on the number of words, syllables, or morphemes.

THIS STUDY

The primary objective of this study was to compare developmental trajectories associated with accuracy and speed of reading letters, isolated words, and text in L1 and L2. There is a dearth of research on questions concerning stages in the development of efficient reading in bilingual children and the extent to which the development of reading in L2 emulates the development of reading efficiency documented with children learning to read in their L1. Intuitively, one would expect that children should be more accurate in reading in their L1 because they would have had more exposure in their environment to L1-relevant preliteracy enriching experiences. Furthermore, by definition, the L1 lexicon and syntactic knowledge are much more elaborated than the parallel L2 components. In addition, in the L1, young children learn to read words and syntactic structures that are already part of their repertoire, whereas in L2, children learn the new alphabet, the meaning of new words, and syntactic rules at the same time as they learn to recognize accurately the written form of these features. According to a global, L2-proficiency-based explanatory framework, it would be reasonable to expect to find, regardless of the languages involved, a gap between children's performance on parallel accuracy and speed measures in L1 and L2. Less accurate and slower reading rate of isolated words in L2 may be related to limited exposure, to slow and inefficient decoding, and to slow and inefficient activation of the existing lexicon (Segalowitz, 1986). Slower reading rate of L2 texts may be the result of the cumulative effects of slow and inefficient decoding, of slow and inefficient activation of the existing lexicon, as well as of incomplete, slow, and inefficient activation of morphosyntactic knowledge.

However, a consideration of differences in orthographic structure and of potential inhibiting or facilitating effects of differences in orthographic complexity on

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rate of acquisition yields alternative predictions. As previously discussed, there is evidence that under untirned conditions young children reach higher decoding accuracy rates earlier in Hebrew, their L2, than in English, their L1 (Geva & Siegel, 1991; Geva et al., 1993). In other words, a trade-off may exist between slower and inefficient lexical access in the L2 on the one hand and less demanding letter-sound correspondence rules on the other hand. If this is so, then one would not anticipate finding a large gap between decoding accuracy of isolated words in English and Hebrew for beginning readers. However, a L1 advantage should emerge on tasks that require the integration of word recognition with lexical, orthographic, and morphosyntactic knowledge. By definition, such integration is crucial when the reading task involves connected discourse, but not when isolated words are involved.

One possible outcome might be that the native speakers of English would read Hebrew more slowly than English due to the structural differences between the orthographies. That is, if they are accustomed to reading familiar letters from left to right in English, they would read Hebrew more slowly because of factors such as unfamiliarity with letter shapes and right-to-left script. Such factors have been shown to influence adult L2 readers due to transfer of L1 reading patterns at both orthographic (Akamatsu, 1996; Chitiri et al., 1992; Geva & Siegel, 1991; Koda, 1989; Sun, 1992) and phonological (Ben-Dror, Frost, & Bentin, 1995) levels, but they may have less impact on children who are learning to read in English and Hebrew at the same time, because L1 strategies have no time advantage over those required by L2. At the same time, orthographic differences may indeed make differential demands on processing resources; this study focuses on reading efficiency to determine the relative demands of English and Hebrew in that domain.

A second objective was to examine the differences between poor and good readers on accuracy and speed across L1 and L2. It was hypothesized that the processes and stages described earlier for early aspects of learning to read in L1 should emerge in children's L2 as well. As they learn to read in an L2, both good and poor readers are initially engaged in learning to recognize the L2 alphabet and then move to what Ehri (1995) referred to as Phase 1, namely, learning to recognize words accurately. Therefore, differences between good and poor readers should occur first on accuracy measures. As their L2 lexicon increases, and as they become more accurate in decoding the L2 script, good readers presumably also become faster than poor readers in recognizing familiar words (Phase 2), and eventually may move earlier than poor readers to what Ehri (1995) referred to as Phase 3, or sight-word reading,

A methodological issue of concern in all cross-linguistic research concerns equivalence of tasks (Geva & Wade-Woolley, 1994; Koda, 1994). Materials and instruments in studies investigating parallel processes must of necessity be of equal validity in order to provide an accurate picture of underlying differences between languages. There are a number of dimensions, however, along which the functional

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equivalence of stimulus materials may be controlled (e.g., word length, syllable structure, frequency, morphological structure) and because it is not feasible (or even possible in some cases) to align materials on all the dimensions at the same time, researchers must make a decision about the most meaningful dimension for the question under analysis. For example, the highly frequent word apple has two syllables and an orthographically regular spelling. In Hebrew, however, its translation, tapuax, has three syllables and is one of the few exceptional spelling patterns (Geva et al., 1993). If frequency is used as a criterion, these words might well be chosen as stimuli. If L2 learners of Hebrew perform poorly on high-frequency words, it may be because of the orthographic inequivalence, despite the fact that the words are of equal frequency. Although these inherent confounds may be avoided in some types of research by the use of pseudowords, in research paradigms where use of context is a variable this choice is not an option. In this study, the intent was to examine the ability to use context to enhance the efficiency of reading, and thus the decision was made to equate materials on the basis of vocabulary and syntactic complexity.

METHOD

Participants

Results reported here are based on the performance of children with English as their first or best language and whose parents signed a consent form. The data of a small number of children who spoke Hebrew at home were not included in the analyses. When the children were in Grade 1, the sample consisted of 75 children (38 boys and 37 girls) from nine classes in a private, middle-class bilingual English-Hebrew day school in a large metropolitan city in ~anada. '

Children were tested in the middle of Grade 1 and again a year later when they were in Grade 2. During the first testing period the age range was 72 to 83 months (mean age = 78 months). Due to the inevitable loss of a small number of children between Grades 1 and 2, and some missing data, a complete data set was available for 66 children.

Grades in the school range from junior kindergarten (age 4) to Grade 8. The systematic instruction of English and Hebrew reading and writing skills commences in Grade 1. The general English curriculum is often taught in the morning, and in the afternoon they are "immersed" in the Hebrew curriculum, when only Hebrew is spoken. The English program is taught by native English speakers, and the Hebrew program is taught by native Hebrew speakers. In the lower grades, a

' ~ u e to the requirement to obtain parental consent, random sampling was not feasible. Furthemore, sampling additional children from other day schools in the city would have been inappropriate, as these schools vary with regard to the proportion and focus of the Hebrew studies.

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communicative approach is used to develop oral and written Hebrew language skills through topics such as the seasons, the family, Jewish holidays, and Bible stories. Except for a number of coin phrases in Hebrew, children participating in the study spoke no Hebrew prior to Grade 1. In the middle of Grade 1, when they were first tested, children's command of Hebrew was minimal because it was based solely on 6 months of daily oral and literacy instruction. The teaching of reading and writing skills in both languages combines theme-based literacy instruction with specific decoding skills. The academic program is fairly demanding, with a school day that starts at 9 a.m. and continues to 4 p.m. Homework is assigned daily.

Measures

Reading efficiency in English. The Biemiller Test of Reading Processes (Biemiller, 1981) was used to measure accuracy and speed in naming letters, words, and text inEnglish. The Letter Reading subtest of the Biemiller (hereafter, ELetters) consists of 50 lowercase printed letters, typed on an 8" x 11" page. The child has to name the letters as fast as she or he can. Two measures are derived: letter-naming speed and letter-naming errors. Speed of basic reading processes in English was tested with the "Text" and "Scrambled Words" subtests of the Biemiller. Biemiller pointed out that the passage and scrambled word list were designed to measure reading speed for materials that a child can decode with minimal difficulty. Children are required to read as fast as they can a 100-word primer level story with simple short sentences @Story) and then arandom list of 50 isolated words @Words) from the same story. The tasks are administered in the following sequence: letters, story, and words.

Reading efficiency in Hebrew. In L2, a parallel task was developed by the authors. The Hebrew letters subtest (HLetters) consists of 50 printed Hebrew letters. To design a parallel Text and Scrambled Words task in Hebrew, Hebrew teachers were asked to provide a list of words they had taught up to the middle of the year in Grade 1. The word list included vocabulary items related to curriculum topics such as holidays, the seasons, colors, commonly used adjectives and prepositions, names of clothing items, animal names, and commonly used verbs. Out of this compiled list a short Hebrew text, dealing with the topic of winter, was composed by the authors. As is the case with the parallel English text, the Hebrew text includes a high proportion of highly familiar Hebrew words and a high proportion of repeated words (e.g., red hat, red mittens, red nose) to which the children had had ample exposure in their oral and written forms. The text condition was created from the word list using simple sentences with no embedding or complex syntactic elements.

Identical instructions and scoring procedures were used in both languages. Furthermore, when the Hebrew version was administered, instructions were given

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in English to ensure that the children understood the task demands. Instructions were to read as fast as possible without worrying about making mistakes. When a child hesitated in reading a word it was immediately provided by the tester to minimize effects on speed. Errors included word substitutions and words supplied by the tester. Correct self-corrections were noted on the scoring sheet but were not included in the error count.

Accuracy scores. Accuracy scores for each subtest in both languages are reported in terms of the percentage of items read correctly out of the total number of words on the respective Letters, Words, and Text tasks (see the Speed Scores section). A stringent criterion was used to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate readers: Children who in Grade 1 made 5% or more errors in naming the isolated word list in English were classified as inaccurate readers (n = 27), and children who made less than 5% errors were classified as accurate readers (n = 39).

Speed scores. As indicated in the previous section, in each language the letter-naming task requires participants to name 50 letters. However, eight of the Hebrew letter names consist of two syllables (e.g., ale$ dalet). In English only "w" has a multisyllable name. As a result, the English letter-naming task has 51 syllables, but the Hebrew letter-naming task has 71 syllables. A similar measurement problem emerged in choosing the basic unit of analysis for calculating speed in the Story and Words conditions. When we equated the number of words in the English and the original Hebrew stories (100 words in each), the Hebrew text had twice as many syllables as the English text. As previously discussed, this effect reflects the heavily inflected nature of Hebrew. Because we were interested in the development of efficient reading, after piloting, it was decided to shorten the Hebrew text and to equate the Hebrew text with the English text, not on number of words but on the number of syllables. The original Biemiller text, which remained intact, consists of 118 syllables, and the Hebrew revised text consists of 117 syllables. This modification resulted in a Hebrew text consisting of 55 words (compared with 100 words in English). Likewise, the number of syllables in the Hebrew isolated words condition was equated with the number of syllables in the English isolated words condition (58 and 57 in Hebrew and English, respectively). This resulted in a list of 34 isolated words in Hebrew (compared with 50 in English). The following formula, proposed by Biemiller, was used to calculate speed ratios for letters, isolated words, and text:

60(,,nc, x number of items in task + reading time (I,,,,&).

From a theoretical and a measurement-based perspective, there is a lack of clarity as to the most appropriate unit of analysis for comparing reading speed across languages. As an extra precaution, using the formula just given, speed results were

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calculated twice. In one set of analyses, the formula was used to calculate speed on Letters, Story, and Words tasks in each language in terms of words-per-minute ratios. In another set of analyses, this formula was used to calculate speed in terms of syllables-per-minute ratios. These alternate analyses yielded practically identical result patterns. For this reason only the results of the syllable-based analyses are reported.

L2 proficiency. This was a test of listening comprehension in which children heard an experimenter read aloud a sentence in Hebrew (e.g., The cat is under the table) and then selected from an array of four pictures the one corresponding to the sentence they had just heard. No oral productions were required on the part of the children. The 20 items manipulated elements such as plurality, prepositions, and gender. The analyses were performed on percentage correct. For technical reasons, the listening comprehension measure was not administered to all participants; the sample size for this measure is 43 rather than 66 (with an equal distribution of male and female participants).

Procedures

The administration of the task battery took place in the middle of Grade 1 and again in the middle of Grade 2. The English and Hebrew reading tasks were administered in two consecutive sessions. The English Biemiller test was administered in the first session, and its Hebrew counterpart was administered in the following session. Testing was carried out by two bilingual English-Hebrew-speaking university students who administered the Hebrew version and two English-speaking university students who administered the English version.

RESULTS

Individual differences in the development of reading efficiency are investigated in this study in two ways: Speed and accuracy indices within and across languages are reported as correlations and then analyzed within a multivariate framework. In the latter analysis, language (English vs. Hebrew), task (letters, words, story), and grade (1 vs. 2) are treated as repeated measures, and reading level (accurate vs. inaccurate) is treated as a "between" factor. Results of two multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) are reported, one in which the (repeated) dependent variables were accuracy scores, and one in which the (repeated) dependent variables were speed scores. Results associated with accuracy scores are presented first. These are followed by a description of results associated with speed scores. Finally, results

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pertaining to the development of L2 listening comprehension and its contribution to reading efficiency are presented.

Development of Accurate Reading of Letters, Isolated Words, and Text in L1 and L2

Table 1 displays the correlations of all reading measures with Grade 1 accuracy on word reading in English. They show that Grade 1 accuracy in reading isolated words is a robust index of performance on the remaining measures, with the exception of letter naming, in both languages and grades. The correlations range from r = -30 for the correlation between English word accuracy in Grade 1 and word speed in Grade 2, to r = .81 for the correlation between accuracy in English word reading and text reading in Grade 1. Although the previous examples were both within the participants' L1, strong cross-language relationships were also found. English word reading in Grade 1 was significantly and positively correlated with all the Hebrew accuracy and speed measures of word and text reading in Grade 1 and 2.

Table 2 presents summary statistics associated with English and Hebrew accuracy rates on letters, isolated words, and text within each grade and reading level. Figures 1 and 2 present a graphic rendition of pertinent means within the accurate and inaccurate groups. Results of the MANOVA are summarized in Table 3. As can be seen in Table 3, the effects of reading level, grade, language, and task were highly significant. These highly significant main effects indicate that accurate readers had higher scores than inaccurate readers, that in Grade 2 children were reading more accurately than in Grade 1, that accuracy rates were not identical across tasks, and that overall accuracy rates were higher in English, the L1, than in

TABLE 1 Correlations Between Word-Reading Accuracy in Grade 1 and English

and Hebrew Speed and Accuracy Measures in Grades 1 and 2

English Hebrew Grade 1 Word Accuracy Correlations With: Accuracy Speed Accuracy Speed

Letters, Grade 1 .ll .38** .48*** .03 Words, Grade 1 1.00 .62*** .60*** .36** Story, Grade 1 .81*** .40** .64*** .42** Letters, Grade 2 .I1 .27* .20 .17 Words, Grade 2 .49*** .30* .46** .47** Story, Grade 2 .39** .45** .38** .47**

Note. N = 66. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

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TABLE 2 Development of Reading Accuracy in English and Hebrew and L2

Listening Comprehension: Summary Statistics (Percentage Correct)

~ c c u r a t e ~ inaccurateb

Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 1 Grade 2

Language M SD M SD M SD M SD

English Letters 99.69 0.73 99.64 5.05 99.55 1.54 99.48 4.68 Words 98.36 1.65 98.36 2.87 85.33 5.84 97.11 5.11 Story 98.46 2.48 99.18 4.41 91.15 6.91 98.25 6.17

Hebrew Letters 91.74 7.41 92.66 5.05 82.15 20.60 91.03 4.68 Words 86.42 15.01 97.98 2.87 65.14 30.59 95.22 5.10 Story 85.41 17.39 96.09 4.41 61.89 27.21 93.87 6.16

Hebrew listening comprehensionC 58.88 14.40 77.39 11.67 54.54 15.27 76.14 15.03

an = 39. bn = 27. 'For accurate readers, n = 21; for inaccurate readers, n = 22.

TABLE 3 Effects of Reading Level, Grade, Language, and Task on Accuracy

Scores: Multivariate Analysis of Variance Summary Table

Effect -

MSE df F P

Reading level .818 Grade 1.715 Language 2.076 Task .I35 Level x Grade .578 Level x Language .I93 Grade x Language .840 Level x Task .082 Grade x Task .238 Language x Task .24 Level x Grade x Language .I16 Level x Grade x Task .059 Level x Language x Task .007 Grade x Language x Task .069 Level x Grade x Language x Task .007

Note. N = 66.

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60 I I I

Letters Words Story

FIGURE 1 Development of reading accuracy in English and Hebrew (accurate readers only; n = 39).

-- I I I

Letters Words Story

FIGURE 2 Development of reading accuracy in English and Hebrew (inaccurate readers only; n = 27).

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DEVELOPMENT OF READING EFFICIENCY 1 33

Hebrew, the L2. In addition, however, most of the interactions involving these factors were significant. To simplify the interpretation of this complex set of results, we discuss first the results involving within-language accuracy development. Cross-language comparisons are discussed in the next subsection.

Reading accuracy development in English. An examination of the means in Figure 1 indicates that in the accurate group, children's performance on each of the English tasks reached a ceiling by Grade 1. This is not a surprising effect given that this group included those children who made less than 5% errors on the EWords task. Post hoc Scheff6 tests confirmed that in the accurate group there were no significant differences among any task components in Grade 1 or 2. Conversely, as can be seen in Figure 2, Grade 1 children in the inaccurate group were less accurate on EWords than on ELetters or EStory. Post hoc Scheff6 tests confirmed that in Grade 2 these children were significantly more accurate on the ELetters than on the EWords task, p c .01. The differences between ELetters and EStory did not reach significance. By Grade 2, their word recognition accuracy had increased, and the difference between ELetters and EWords disappeared, p > .05. In sum, in English, the interaction of grade, reading level, and task reflects the relatively lower performance in Grade 1 in the inaccurate group on EWord, and the fact that by Grade 2 accuracy had increased on this task, so that performance in both groups on all tasks had reached a ceiling.

Reading accuracy development in Hebrew. An examination of Figures 1 and 2 reveals a different pattern on the parallel Hebrew tasks than the one observed in English. First, one notes that in Grade 1, performance did not reach the ceiling on any task. This observation was true in the accurate as well as in the inaccurate groups. In addition, there was a large gap in Grade 1 between accurate and inaccurate readers on Words and HStory, Scheff6, p < .0001. However, a significant improvement was noted in both groups from Grade 1 to Grade 2 on W o r d s and HStory, Scheff6, p < .001. Additionally, by Grade 2, the performance of children in the accurate group approached the ceiling, and the gap between accurate and inaccurate readers had decreased considerably. As a result, the significant differences between the accurate and inaccurate groups noted in Grade 1 on W o r d s and HStory disappeared. At the same time, accuracy in Hebrew letter naming did not improve significantly from Grade 1 to Grade 2, Scheff6, p > .05.

Finally, we turn to an examination of the pattern of relations among letter, word, and story reading in English and Hebrew. As illustrated in Figures 1 and 2, in Grade 1, regardless of reading group, children were more accurate in naming the Hebrew letters than in reading the HStory and the Words, Scheff6, p < .0001. However, in Grade 2 the pattern of relations among mean accuracy scores on the three Hebrew tasks had changed Accuracy on W o r d and HStory had increased considerably,

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and it became higher than accuracy on HLetters. In the accurate group, the difference between HLetters and HWords was significant, Scheffk, p < .001, but it did not reach significance in the inaccurate group. Furthermore, no differences were found between accuracy on HWords and HStory in any of the comparisons.

In sum, in Hebrew the interaction of task, grade, and reading level reflects the fact that in Grade 1 scores were higher on the letter-naming task than on the story and isolated words tasks and that on each of the tasks reading accuracy was much lower in the inaccurate group than in the accurate group. By Grade 2, not only did children's accuracy improve, but the gap between accurate and inaccurate readers almost disappeared. As a result of increased accuracy, they also made fewer errors in reading isolated words and text than in naming Hebrew letters. Finally, whereas in Grade 1 there was a fairly consistent advantage for English, this language effect all but disappeared in Grade 2.

Development of Fast Reading of Letters, Isolated Words, and Text in L I and L2

Table 4 provides summary statistics associated with speed measures in L1 and L2 for accurate and inaccurate readers. It is important to note, however, that the speed data for the inaccurate readers is confounded with accuracy. For example, if a child could not read a word in the text condition, it was supplied by the experimenter and, although this was done quickly, it nevertheless added to the overall reading rate. The speed scores of those children who were deemed inaccurate readers most likely reflect this confound and therefore are not discussed in much detail. Figure 3 describes visually the developmental patterns associated with pertinent group means. The results of the MANOVA comparing parallel L1 and L2 speed measures for each of the dependent variables, with grade, language, and task as (repeated) independent variables are summarized in Table 5. As can be seen in Table 5, there was a main effect for grade, language, and task. As was the case with the accuracy data, overall, children read faster in Grade 2 than they read in Grade 1 ; they also read faster in English than in Hebrew. Finally, the task main effect involved an overall advantage for the Story condition over the Isolated Words and Letter conditions, Scheff6, p < .0001. In addition, however, all the interactions involving these factors were significant. To simplify the interpretation of this complex set of results, we discuss separately the results involving reading speed development in English and Hebrew.

Reading speed development in English. As can be seen in Table 4 and Figure 3, in English accurate readers' speed on ELetters and EWords was identical in each grade level. However, in both grades they were faster on the story than on letters and words, Scheff6, p < .0001. This pattern did not change f-rom Grade 1 to

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TABLE 4 Development of Reading Speed in English and Hebrew for Accurate

and Inaccurate Readers: Summary Statistics

~ c c u r a t e ~ inaccurateb

Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 1 Grade 2

Language M SD M SD M SD M SD

English Letters 84.59 15.46 108.26 22.87 75.89 13.97 98.15 19.69 Words 86.04 25.13 110.09 23.86 52.40 25.91 96.19 21.62 Story 141.21 105.30 194.42 54.62 62.86 29.65 146.35 44.84

Hebrew Letters 63.40 16.50 81.04 28.15 62.07 22.80 72.73 16.43 Words 46.77 26.34 123.05 29.53 30.06 19.49 99.91 24.49 Story 41.03 19.60 111.93 30.95 26.45 14.46 86.93 21.03

Note. Unit of analysis = syllables per minute. an = 39. = 27.

0 1 I I I

Letters Words Story

FIGURE 3 The development of reading speed in English and Hebrew (accurate readers only; n = 33).

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TABLE 5 Effects of Grade, Language, and Task on Speed Scores:

Multivariate Analysis of Variance Summary Table

Effect MSE df F P

Grade 211,852.9 1,35 92.66 .0001 Language 198,777.6 1,35 131.90 .OW1 Task 58,131.3 2,70 41.77 ,0001 Grade x Language 12,250.3 1,35 9.20 .01 Grade x Task 16,358.4 2,70 13.17 .OW1 Language x Task 64,458.5 2,70 52.27 .0001 Grade x Language x Task 7,724.3 2,70 5.96 .01

Note. For accurate readers only; n = 39.

Grade 2. Furthermore, on each task the improvement from Grade 1 to Grade 2 was statistically significant, Scheff6, p < .001.

Reading speed development in Hebrew. In Hebrew, the pattern of relations among the task means is more complex than the one noted in the L1. In Grade 1, altogether mean speed scores were low, and no differentiation between tasks was noted, Scheff6, p > .05. In Grade 2, the change in letter-naming speed was only marginal, but there was a dramatic increase in W o r d s and HStory speed, Scheff6, p < .0001. As a result, speed means on W o r d s and HStory in Grade 2 were higher than on Hebrew letter naming. Furthermore, whereas in English in both grade levels the text was read faster than the isolated word list, a similar effect was not noticed in Hebrew. Instead, the word list and the story were read at the same speed.

The comparison of parallel English and Hebrew task means indicated that in Grade 1 the difference between the speed of letter naming in English and Hebrew was not significant. However, the differences between the corresponding English and Hebrew word and text reading tasks were significant, Scheff6, p < .05 and p < .00001, respectively. Indeed, as can be seen in Figure 3, the gap between the Grade 1 English and Hebrew story means was pronounced. However, in Grade 2 there was no language effect on the letter-naming task, Scheff6,p > .05. More surprising was the fact that there was no language effect on the Words tasks, Scheff6, p > .05. In other words, in Grade 2 children read familiar, primer level decontextualized words at the same speed in English and Hebrew. At the same time, even though in both languages children increased their speed of story reading, the gap noted in Grade 1 between English and Hebrew was maintained in Grade 2. Scheff6, p c .0001.

To sum up, the effects of language and grade level were not parallel across tasks. Instead, letter naming was faster in L1 than in L2. This difference disappeared,

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however, by Grade 2. Likewise, whereas isolated words were read faster in Grade 1 in English than in Hebrew, this difference disappeared altogether in Grade 2. The only task on which the L1 advantage was maintained was the story. This advantage is attributable to context enhancement. A similar advantage did not emerge for Hebrew in Grade 2.

Also relevant to an understanding of the relation between reading with and without context in L1 and L2 is the finding that in Hebrew in Grade 1 the correlation between accurate word and story reading was r = .94, and the correlation between speed of reading words and text was r = .96. These correlations dropped in Grade 2 to r = .69 and r = .86, correspondingly. The extremely high correlations in Grade 1 suggest that children approached both word and story reading in the same manner, and the subsequent drop indicates increasing differentiation. The precise nature of the developmental change can be localized to enhanced use of linguistic knowledge. A repeated-measures analysis of variance on Hebrew proficiency as measured by listening comprehension showed a main effect for grade level, F(l, 41) = 120.01, p < .0001, with no significant interaction of reading accuracy, suggesting that both accurate and inaccurate readers gained in linguistic knowledge of Hebrew.

A series of multiple regressions explored the causal relations between Hebrew proficiency and reading efficiency. Listening comprehension played no predictive role in explaining individual differences in reading accuracy in Grade 1 or 2. Furthermore, in light of the extremely high correlations between word and text reading in Hebrew in Grade 1, it is not surprising that listening comprehension was not a significant predictor of accuracy or speed of text reading. Instead, accuracy in text reading was predicted by word reading accuracy, explaining 87% of the variance, and speed of text reading was predicted by speed of word reading, explaining 88% of the variance. By the following year, however, the effects of linguistic knowledge began to be evident. Although speed of Hebrew word reading was the best predictor of speed of reading Hebrew text, explaining 75% of the variance, listening comprehension contributed another 5% of the unique variance.

DISCUSSION

First, it should be noted that accuracy on Grade 1 word reading in English (the L1) differentiated good and poor readers equally in both languages, and this remained strong in both Grade 1 and Grade 2. This observation supports previous research on common underlying individual differences in reading development and reading skills in L1 and L2 (Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Cisero & Royer, 1995; Durgunoglu et al., 1993; Geva & Ryan, 1993; Geva et al., 1993). It must be noted, however, that the interpretation of this relation would be more reliable if an independent measure of word recognition had been used as the grouping variable for reading level. This study used the Grade 1 measure of isolated word reading to determine

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subsequent reading level groupings; we thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this decision may influence our interpretation of the findings. Children were more accurate in naming letters and in reading text in their L1 than in Hebrew, a language they were just beginning to acquire. In addition, good readers were more accurate than poor readers on all the measures within each language, except for L1 letter naming. In fact, children made no errors in naming letters in their L1, presumably because they had had ample exposure to English letter names. They did not have a similar exposure to letter naming in Hebrew and therefore made more errors in that language. Furthermore, in their L1, accurate readers did not seem to require context in order to assist them in word recognition. As a result, they were able to achieve high accuracy on both the isolated word reading task as well as on the story. On the other hand, the less accurate readers had poorer word recognition skills, and in the absence of contextual scaffolding their reading skills were not sufficient to allow for effortless isolated word reading in English. Yet, they benefitted from the availability of contextual clues and made less errors in the story condition.

The lower text reading accuracy noted in Hebrew in Grade 1 could be attributed to L2 proficiency. Minimal L2 proficiency meant that in Grade 1 neither the accurate nor the inaccurate readers had sufficient lexical and syntactic Hebrew knowledge to assist them in reading Hebrew text. Even though contextual scaffolding was available, children's linguistic knowledge was not sufficient to be able to productively use that information. In fact, the extremely high correlation between Hebrew text and words accuracy suggests that the task demands associated with the story and the decontextualized word list were not drastically different in Grade 1. Instead, on both tasks children engaged primarily in a bottom-up type of linear, right-to-left decoding. Evidence that children began to process isolated words and text differently in Hebrew comes from the drop in the strength of the correlation between these two measures in Grade 2. By Grade 2, despite incomplete linguistic proficiency in Hebrew, the relative benefits of L1 proficiency seen in Grade 1 almost disappeared so that word-related accuracy rates in the two orthographies did not differ for either accurate or inaccurate readers.

L2-L1 differences in linguistic proficiency may be sufficient to explain also the fact that in Grade 1 children were faster as well as more accurate on the English tasks than on the Hebrew tasks. That is, it could be reasonably argued that even when accuracy in decoding has been achieved in both languages, children may not be able to access as efficiently their L2 linguistic knowledge as they can in their L1. The finding that in Grade 2 children did not read the Hebrew story faster than the words seems to provide further support to an L2-proficiency-based framework.

The common sense assumption that reading is positively associated with language proficiency would lead to the expectation that decoding should be more accurate and faster in children's L1. Yet, a simple L2-proficiency-based explanation does not address appropriately the finding that in Grade 2 isolated words were read

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DEVELOPMENT OF READING EFLlCIENCY 139

with equal accuracy and equal speed in both languages. That is, the ability to read high-frequency familiar words efficiently was associated less closely with language familiarity. As the results of the multiple regression have indicated, L2 proficiency, as measured by listening comprehension, plays no predictive role in explaining individual differences in accuracy or speed of word recognition. When faced with the requirement to read isolated words, children could not rely on contextual clues for word recognition. Instead, they needed to draw on well-developed decoding skills; efficient word recognition in L1 and L2 were thus highly similar. There is evidence to suggest that due to its shallow orthography, children achieve high decoding accuracy earlier in Hebrew than in English, even when Hebrew is taught as an L2 (Geva & Siegel, 1991). Results of this study extend this observation to the more general construct of word recognition efficiency.

Two interpretations need to be considered to understand the finding that children did not benefit from context in the Hebrew story reading even though they could do so in English. A L2-based proficiency explanation would suggest that speed of lexical access is not efficient and that knowledge of other aspects of the reading process involving syntactic and morphological knowledge is not readily available. According to this view, context is not facilitating in Hebrew because the learners have not yet reached some minimal proficiency threshold. Below some unspecified L2 proficiency threshold, syntactic and semantic knowledge does not play a discernible role in facilitating top-down comprehension processes and fluency in reading L2 text (Cziko, 1978). This interpretation is supported by the fact that, despite the significant improvement in listening comprehension from Grade 1 to Grade 2, the proficiency measure explained only 5% of the variance on text reading speed and made no contribution to text reading accuracy.

An additional level of interpretation concerns specific cross-language differences in morphosyntactic structure. As noted earlier, Hebrew has a complex morphosyntactic structure with a high ratio of morphemically dense Hebrew "words." When children read the Hebrew text, they need to unpack these words into their constituent morphemes, a process that is linguistically and cognitively demanding (Shimron & Sivan, 1994). If the children were simply decoding linearly the text and the isolated words, it is not surprising that in Grade 1 there was no difference in the accuracy and speed of reading connected and unconnected discourse. Improvement on the listening comprehension measure indicates that by Grade 2 these young bilingual learners already possessed rudiments of Hebrew syntactic and semantic knowledge. In light of this it may be surprising that their reading fluency did not benefit more from the availability of some syntactic and semantic information. Although it is possible that the Hebrew proficiency demon- strated by the children was still insufficient to generate contextual facilitation in terms of accuracy, it is equally possible that this interacts with the need to unpack morphemes, which adds an additional layer of complexity to the reading of Hebrew text. In other words, reading text in Hebrew is more complex than reading a similar

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text in a language in which morphosyntactic unpacking is less demanding, such as English. Indeed, as the results of Shirnron and Sivan indicate, the heavy processing demands associated with morphemic unpacking play a role even in the text-reading speed of highly literate bilingual Hebrew-English adults. According to this explanation, it is not only lack of L2 linguistic proficiency that slows down text reading for L2 beginners, but also the high morphemic density associated with inflected languages such as Hebrew. In all likelihood, for L2 learners these two factors may be complementary. More research is needed to weigh the relative merits of these explanations.

Another point that requires some thought in considering the extent to which parallel processes exist in the early development of L1 and L2 reading skills concerns the role of efficient letter naming. In the English-as-L1 reading acquisition research literature, efficient letter naming has been seen by some authors as an essential indicator of accurate decoding skills (Ehri, 1991). In this respect, results of this study present contradictory results. Children in the early stages of reading acquisition could decode isolated words as accurately in their L1 as in their L2, despite the fact that they did not achieve optimal efficiency in Hebrew letter naming. This result underscores the argument that it is not letter naming per se, but familiarity with the phonemes associated with each letter that is the necessary and crucial skill. Letter naming may be seen, therefore, as an epiphenomenon of rudimentary phonological skills. In North American preschools and with watching television, children receive ample practice in letter naming. This may not be the case in L2. The children in this study were able to decode Hebrew with accuracy and an increasing speed, yet they continued to make letter names errors. In studying L2 reading development in alphabetic languages, efficient letter naming may not be a completely reliable gauge for knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. In L2 contexts, efficient letter naming and efficient access to letter-sound correspondences may not be necessarily isomorphic.

The developmental steps offered by Ehri and Wilce (1983) to describe the development of accuracy and speed English as L1 reading skills (i.e., accuracy attained before speed) are relevant to word recognition processes in L2. However, even though it seems that awareness of this sequence is important in considering L2 reading development, these subtle changes in accuracy and speed do not emerge concurrently in L1 and L2, even when children learn to read concurrently in two languages. In the very early stages of learning to read in an L2, accuracy distin- guishes good from poor readers in both languages. Even when high accuracy rates have been achieved in L2 reading, reading speed continues to develop. Efficient L2 readers are those who can read accurately and fast. Models of L2 reading development should therefore consider a variety of speed and accuracy indices. They should address the interplay of word-based and text-based processes and acknowledge the factors that enable or hinder efficient reading.

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DEVELOPMENT OF READING EFFICIENCY 1 41

Biemiller (1981) suggested that the gap between speed of reading letters versus isolated words and text in L1 can provide an indication of the potential zone for the development of efficient reading. In initial stages of L2 development, such a gap does not exist and therefore cannot be used productively as a benchmark for the potential development of efficient reading in L2. Although this framework is intuitively appealing, given the results of this study, its universal relevance to various writing systems and to L2 reading development must be questioned. Studying how children learn to read simultaneously in two different languages provides a fertile testing ground for some of the claims made about reading acquisition. If, despite differences in orthographic depth, decoding isolated words in L1 and L2 are highly similar (as we found in this study), this raises some questions about the precise role played by fast "lexical access" and fast morphosyntactic unpacking in decoding and in comprehension. To be able to better understand the extent to which component reading skills transfer from L1 to L2 and the extent to which parallel processes can describe the development of efficient reading in L2, more intraparticipant studies are needed, in which careful consideration is given to similarities and differences in the complexity of orthographic structures, the degree of shared lexical sources, depth of lexical familiarity, and familiarity with syntactic constraints. Likewise, we should also seek converging evidence from research paradigms tapping on-line processing differences between early readers of L l and L2 in different orthographies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research reported in this article was partially funded by a small-scale general research grant from the Natural Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We thank Norm A. Himel for his invaluable contributions.

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Manuscript received July 19, 1995 Final Revision received June 5, 1996 Accepted June 1 1,1996

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Documents

Development of Reading Efficiency in First and Second Language