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,
