The learnability and psychological processing of reading in Chinese and English: Differences and similarities

Abstract

The main purpose of this paperisto briefly review some empiricalfindings on the processingmechanisms ofskilled readers and beginning readersin Chinese andEnglish and to compare the learnability of reading in the two languages. In the learning processes, a similar global-to-analytic developmental path existsin both languages, although there are differencesin the kinds of predictors of early reading acquisition. It is argued that while Chinese-English orthography differences have some effect on the learning and processingmechanismsfollowed, the effect does not amount to making one system as a whole easier and faster to process or to learn than the other.