Alphabetic orthographies differ with respect to how consistently letters map onto sounds. For example, in Finnish, Italian, or Greek, a given letter is almost always pronounced the same in different words. These writing systems are referred to as consistent or transparent. In contrast, in English and to a lesser degree in French, a given letter is often pronounced differently in different words (e.g., a in cat, was, saw, made, and car). These writing systems are referred to as inconsistent or opaque. The orthographic consistency of a writing system has been shown to influence fundamental aspects of skilled reading, such as the importance of phonological information or the grain size of basic reading units (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987;Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun, 2001).Over the past decade, it has become clear that orthographic consistency is the key factor determining the rate of reading acquisition across different languages (for a review, see ). One of the most striking demonstrations comes from a cross-language investigation in which reading performance was measured at the end of Grade 1 in 14 European countries (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). Whereas reading accuracy in most transparent languages (e.g., Italian, German, Greek, Spanish, and Finnish) reached ceiling at this time, accuracy in less transparent languages (e.g., Portuguese, French, and Danish) was lower, around 80%. However, reading performance in English, the least transparent of the orthographies studied, was only 34%. This basic finding has been replicated in a number of small-scale experiments (Bruck,

Although the transparency of a writing system is hypothesized to systematically influence the cognitive skills associated with reading development, results of cross-language investigations are inconsistent and usually do not address this issue in a developmental context. We therefore investigated the cognitive dynamics of reading fluency of different word types in Grades 1–4 in three orthographies differing in degree of transparency (Hungarian, Dutch, and Portuguese). The overall results showed that the relative strength of the contributions of phonological awareness and rapid naming to word reading fluency shifted as a function of reading expertise: The contribution of phonological awareness remained significant in all grades but decreased as a function of grade, whereas the contribution of rapid naming increased. Orthographic depth systematically modulated the strength of the cognitive contributions to reading, but not the overall developmental pattern. Together, these results indicate that the cognitive development of reading skill is fairly universal (at least for alphabetic scripts) and that differences in orthographic depth will not recruit different cognitive processes but will mainly be expressed in rate of reading development.

The present study used a variant of masked priming to track the development of 2 marker effects of orthographic and phonological processing from Grade 1 through Grade 5 in a cross-sectional study. Pseudohomophone (PsH) priming served as a marker for phonological processing, whereas transposed-letter (TL) priming was a marker for coarse-grained orthographic processing. The results revealed a clear developmental picture. First, the PsH priming effect was significant and remained stable across development, suggesting that phonology not only plays an important role in early reading development but continues to exert a robust influence throughout reading development. This finding challenges the view that more advanced readers should rely less on phonological information than younger readers. Second, the TL priming effect increased monotonically with grade level and reading age, which suggests greater reliance on coarse-grained orthographic coding as children become better readers. Thus, TL priming effects seem to be a good marker effect for children's ability to use coarse-grained orthographic coding to speed up direct lexical access in alphabetic languages. The results were predicted by the dual-route model of orthographic processing, which suggests that direct orthographic access is achieved through coarse-grained orthographic coding that tolerates some degree of flexibility in letter order.