Abstract:

Reading is a complex cognitive activity that draws upon the reader’s ability to process and integrate phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. Learning to read requires a number of skills that underpin the development of fluent word recognition and meaning comprehension. Until recently, much of the research on the structure and contribution of these skills to reading has been confined to the English language. With the emergence of cross-linguistic studies of reading it has become increasingly evident that reading development must be considered in terms of the linguistic properties of a given language, including its orthographic, morphological, and phonological characteristics, because these properties will influence the ease and speed of reading acquisition, the choice of word processing strategies, and the relative importance of various cognitive abilities in predicting reading achievement. The study reported in this presentation is a first attempt to investigate systematically the development of reading ability and its concurrent predictors in a sample of Russian-speaking children. Seventy-nine first and second graders were administered a battery of 15 tests from which nine objective, interval-scale measures were derived: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, decoding accuracy, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, nonverbal ability (IQ), vocabulary, decoding rate, and rapid naming. In a series of multiple regression analyses, phonological awareness accounted for a small amount of unique variance in both decoding accuracy and decoding rate whereas rapid naming was a unique predictor of decoding rate only. Neither verbal short-term memory nor IQ accounted for any variance in decoding. For reading comprehension, IQ and linguistic comprehension contributed a substantial amount of variance to the prediction of achievement whereas decoding rate did not. However, in a series of direct discriminant function analyses, reliable differences emerged between good and poor decoders on reading comprehension, indicating that decoding is relevant to reading comprehension in young Russian readers. The good and poor readers also differed reliably on phonological awareness, vocabulary, IQ, and listening comprehension. Taken together, the findings indicate that the cognitive operations that drive the development of reading in the Russian language share many similarities with those in other languages including English. However, they also indicate some important characteristics of Russian reading that make it distinct from reading in other languages. These characteristics concern the relative weight of cognitive abilities in determining reading achievement and may reflect the effect of the largely transparent Russian orthography. These findings converge with those obtained in other languages and suggest that reading in all alphabetic languages may be characterized by universal as well as language-specific aspects.

Keywords:

Reading development, literacy, Russian language.