Much attention has been paid to the delay in writing acquisition caused by irregularities of Russian orthography, but little is known about their effect on reading acquisition. Results of the present longitudinal reading acquisition study of Russian first graders suggest that phonological recoding is the dominant strategy in the initial phase of…

The present paper addresses the issue of cross-linguistic transfer of phonemic awareness and word identification skills across two linguistically distant languages (Russian and Hebrew). The role of early literacy learning was directly assessed by distinguishing two groups of Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals; bi-literate (n = 39) and…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…