Abstract
English and Russian are two different orthographies, the former being an opaque orthography, the latter being considered a direct letter-sound language. This study investigated the relationship between reading, syntactic, orthographic, and working memory skills in the two orthographies. Participants were first-year BA students of English (age range 25-30) at the University of Haifa who had completed high school in Russia. They were tested individually, in Russian and English, on working memory, spelling, oral cloze, visual condition, phonological condition, orthographic skills, word attack, and word identification. The results indicated positive significant correlations within and across languages, except for the orthographic skills and some of the correlations of the visual skills. The orthographic skills correlated highly significantly within each language but not across languages. Almost all the other linguistic skills correlated significantly within and across languages. Multiple regression procedures revealed that phonological and spelling skills in Russian, the first language, were strong predictors of word identification in English, the second language. These results are discussed in light of the interdependence and the script-dependent hypotheses.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Abu-Rabia, S. (in press). Language proficiency in four languages: The case of Circassians in Israel. Curriculum and Teaching.
Abu-Rabia, S. (1997). Verbal and working-memory skills of bilingual Hebrew-English speaking children. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 13, 25-40.
Abu-Rabia, S., & Siegel, L. (2001). Reading, syntactic and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Arab children, manuscript submitted.
Ball, E. W. (1993). Phonological awareness. What's important to whom? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 141-159.
Bowey, J. A., & Francis, J. (1991). Phonological analysis as a function of age and exposure to reading instruction. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 91-121.
Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. (1978). Difficulties in auditory organization as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature (London), 271, 746-747.
Brent-Palmer, C. (1979). A sociolinguistic assessment of the notion of immigrant semilingualism from a social conflict perspective. Working Papers on Bilingualism 17, 135-180.
Carlson, P. E. (1981). Field testing the theory of double semilingualism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh.
Coltheart, M. (1978). Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In G. Underwood (Ed.), Strategies of information processing (pp. 151-216). London: Academic Press.
Cummins, J. (1979). Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Review of Educational Research, 49, 221-251.
Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting educational success for language minority students. In School and language minority students: A theoretical framework (pp. 3-49). Los Angeles, California, Department of Education, Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center.
Cummins, J., Swain, M. K., Nakajima, K., Handscombe, J., Green, D., & Trans, C. (1984). Linguistic interdependence among Japanese and Vietnamese immigrant students. In C. Rivera (Ed.), Communicative competence approaches to language proficiency assessment: Research and application (pp. 60-81). Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Da Fontoura, H., & Siegel, L. S. (in press). Reading, syntactic and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Durguno¢glu, A. Y., Nagy, W. E., & Hancin-Bhatt, B. J. (1993). Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 453-465.
Edelsky, C., Hudelson, S., Flores, B., Barkin, F., Altwerger, B., & Jilbert, K. (1983). Semilingualism and language deficit. Applied Linguistics, 4, 1-22.
Forster, K. I., & Chambers, S. (1973). Lexical access and naming time. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12, 627-635.
Genesee, F. (1979). Acquisition of reading skills in immersion programs. Foreign Language Annals, 12, 71-77.
Geva, E., & Siegel, L. S. (1991). Unpublished manuscript.
Jastak, S., & Wilkinson, G. S. (1984). The wide range achievement test-revised. Wilmington, DE: Jastak Associates.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1987). The psychology of reading and language comprehension. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Lambert, W. E., & Tucker, R. G. (1972). Bilingual education of children: The St. Lambert experiment. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W. & Carter, B. (1974). Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, 201-210.
Lindgren, S. D., DeRenzi, E., & Richman, L. C. (1985). Cross-national comparisons of developmental dyslexia in Italy and the United States. Child Development, 56, 1404-1417.
Mace-Matluck, B. J., & Hoover, W. A. (1980). Bilingual reading: Effects of learner characteristics and type of instruction on reading achievement. Paper presented at the 25th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association, St. Louis, MO.
Mace-Matluck, B. J., Hoover, W. A., & Calfee, R. C. (1984). Teaching reading to bilingual children: Final report. Austin TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.
Martin-Jones, M., & Romaine, S. (1986). Semilingualism: A half-baked theory of communicative competence. Applied Linguistics, 7, 26-38.
Meyer, D. C., Schravanevelt, R. W. & Ruddy, M. G. (1974). Loci of contextual effects on word recognition. In P. M. A. Rabbitt & S. Dornic (Eds.), Attention and performance Vol. 5 (pp. 98-118). New York: Academic Press.
Olson, R., Kliegel, R., Davidson, B. J., & Foltz, G. (1985). Individual and developmental differences in reading disability. In T. G. Waller (Ed.), Reading research: Advances in theory and practice, Vol. 4 (pp. 1-64). New York: Academic Press.
Ramirez, J. D., Yuen, S. D., & Ramey, D. R. (1991). Executive summary, Final report: Longitudinal study of structured English immersion strategy, early exit and late exit transitional bilingual education programs for language minority children. San Mateo, CA: Aguirre International.
Rivera, C. (Ed.) (1984). Language proficiency and academic achievement. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Ryan, A., & Meara, P. (1991). The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7, 531-539.
Shimron, J., & Navon, D. (1981). The distribution of information within letters. Perception & Psychophysics, 30, 483-491.
Shimron, J., & Sivan, T. (1994). Reading proficiency and orthography: Evidence from Hebrew and English. Language Learning, 44, 5-27.
Siegel, L. S. (1985). Psycholinguistic aspects of reading disabilities. In L. S. Siegel & F. J. Morrison (Eds.), Cognitive development in atypical children. New York: Springer Verlag.
Siegel, L. S. (1993). The cognitive basis of dyslexia. In R. Pasnak & M. L. Howe (Eds.), Emerging theories in cognitive development, Vol. 2. New York: Springer Verlag.
Siegel, L. S. (1993). The development of reading. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child behavior and development. New York: Academic Press.
Siegel, L. S., & Ryan, E. B. (1988a). The development of working memory in normally achieving and subtypes of disabled children. Child Development, 60, 973-980.
Siegel, L. S., & Ryan, E. B. (1988b). Development of grammatical sensitivity, phonological, and short-form memory skills in normally achieving and learning disabled children. Developmental Psychology, 24, 28-37.
Siegel, L. S., Share, D., & Geva, E. (1990). Unpublished manuscript.
Skjelfjord, V. J. (1987). Phonemic segmentation. An important subskill in learning to read: I. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 31, 41-58.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Toukomaa, P. (1976). Teaching migrant children their mother tongue and learning the language of the host country in the context of the sociocultural situation of the migrant family. Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere.
Snowling, M. J. (1980). The development of grapheme-phoneme correspondence in normal and dyslexic readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 29, 294-305.
So, D., & Siegel, L. (in press). Learning to read Chinese: Semantic, syntactic, phonological and working memory skills in normally achieving and poor Chinese readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Stanovich, K. E. (1982). Individual differences in the cognitive processes of reading: 1. Word decoding. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 15, 485-493.
Stanovich, K. E. (1988a). Explaining the differences between the dyslexic and garden variety poor reader: The phonological-core variance-difference model. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 21, 590-604, 612.
Stanovich, K. E. (1988b). The right and wrong places to look for the cognitive locus of reading disability, Annals of Dyslexia, 38, 154-177.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (1989). Exposure to print and orthographic processing. Reading Research Quarterly, 4, 402-430.
Stevenson, H. W., Stigler, J. M., Lucker, G. W., & Lee, S. Y. (1982). Reading disabilities: The case of Chinese, Japanese and English. Child Development, 53, 1164-1181.
Troike, R. C. (1984). SCALP: Social and cultural aspects of language proficiency. In C. Rivera (Ed.), Language proficiency and academic achievement (pp. 44-54). Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Tunmer, W. E., Herriman, M. L., & Nesdale, A. R. (1988). Metalinguistic abilities and beginning reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 134-158.
Unbegaum, B. O. (1967). Russian grammar. London: Oxford University Press.
Verhoeven, L. (1994) Transfer in bilingual development: The linguistic interdependence hypothesis revisited. Language Learning, 44, 381-415.
Wagner, D., Spratt, J. E., & Ezzaki, A. (1989). Does learning to read in a second language always put the child at a disadvantage? Counterevidence from Morocco. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 31-48.
Wagner, R. K. (1988). Causal relations between the development of phonological processing abilities and the acquisition of reading skills: A meta-analysis. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 34, 261-279.
Walters, G. S., Bruck, M., & Siedenberg, M. (1985). Do children use similar processes to read and spell words? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 511-530.
Woodcock, R. W. (1973). Woodcock reading mastery tests. Circle Press, Minnesota: American Guidance Society.
Yopp, H. K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 159-177.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Abu-Rabia, S. Testing the Interdependence Hypothesis Among Native Adult Bilingual Russian-English Students. J Psycholinguist Res 30, 437–455 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010425825251
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010425825251