Reports the case of a 16-year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, with reading and writing difficulties confined to English. Presents the hypothesis of granularity and transparency, postulating that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent/opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse should…

Examined the ability of bilingual college students from Catalonia, Spain to learn a new vowel contrast as indicated by classifying the vowel, discriminating two vowels, and judging its "category-goodness." Found a lack of behavioral plasticity and that early, extensive exposure to a second language was sufficient to attain the…

This study investigated cross-language and writing system relationship in biliteracy acquisition of children learning to read two different writing systems--Chinese and English. Forty-six Mandarin-speaking children were tested for their first language (Chinese-L1) and second language (English-L2) reading skills. Comparable experiments in Chinese…