Abstract
The impact of cultural differences on cognitive processes is hard to detect, especially when scientific results and models are adopted from another culture. This phenomenon can be observed when models of reading and spelling development in English-speaking children are used by German-speaking investigators without empirical examination. In a longitudinal study of the development of reading and spelling from preschool age up to the end of 4th grade, empirical data are assessed that are useful for the examination of the stage models of literacy. Ten weeks after beginning school, the reading behavior of 153 German first graders were assessed when reading familiar words and pseudowords consisting of either familiar letters or with at least one unfamiliar letter. The behavior is analyzed to detect and discriminate different basal reading strategies (i.e., logographic or cue vs. alphabetic or cipher reading). The results show that two months after beginning institutional reading acquisition there are nearly no logographic reading children. In connection with other German-speaking studies about preschool and early school literacy development, the reported results suggest that for German-speaking children the existence of a common reading strategy before alphabetic reading is to be questioned. Above that, taking over results and models of early literacy or literacy prediction from another written language culture must very carefully be considered.
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Mannhaupt, G., Jansen, H., Marx, H. (1997). Cultural Influences on Literacy Development. In: Leong, C.K., Joshi, R.M. (eds) Cross-Language Studies of Learning to Read and Spell. NATO ASI Series, vol 87. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1197-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1197-5_9
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