For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts - whether they have less regularity in their grapheme-phoneme correspondences or do not make use of alphabetic symbols at all - it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even non-existent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master.

This title presents research on the topic of young children's naive biology, examining such theoretical issues as processes, conditions and mechanisms in conceptual development using the development of biological understanding as the target case.

For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts, it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even nonexistent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master. Researchers in psycholinguistics and educational psychology will welcome this important volume.