List of contributors; 1. Introduction: a cross-linguistic perspective on learning to read and write Margaret Harris and Giyoo Hatano; 2. The acquisition of Italian orthography Giuseppe Cossu; 3. Learning to read German: normal and impaired acquisition Heinz Wimmer, Karin Landerl and Uta Frith; 4. Learning to read and spell in Greek: the importance of letter knowledge and morphological awareness Margaret Harris and Vicky Giannouli; 5. Phonological awareness, syntactic awareness and learning to read and spell in Brazilian Portuguese Lucia Lins Browne Rego; 6. Learning to read and write in Hebrew David Share and Iris Levin; 7. Different morphemes, same spelling problems: cross-linguistic developmental studies Peter Bryant, Terezhina Nunes and Athanasios Aidinis; 8. The relationship between phonological awareness and orthographic representation in different orthographies Usha Goswami; 9. Learning to read in Scandinavia Ingvar Lundberg; 10. Learning to read Chinese J. Richard Hanley, Ovid Tzeng and H.-S. Huang; 11. Reading skill development in bilingual Singaporean children Susan Rickard Liow; 12. Learning to read and write in Japanese Kiyomi Akita and Giyoo Hatano; Index.

"This book provides us with abundant evidence that across a wide range of countries and across the full gamut of reading systems, there is a very close relationship between how easy it is to learn to read and how well the writing system being acquired permits nonlexical print-to-sound translation. Why should this be so? The self-teaching hypothesis provides an appealing answer to this question; hence, the data reported in this book provide strong evidence that this hypothesis is correct." Contemporary Psychology, APA Review of Books