Haskins Publications

Number	992
Year	1995
Drawer	18
Entry Date	07/01/1998
Authors	Lukatela, Katerina, Carello, Claudia, Shankweiler, Donald, and Liberman, Isabelle Y.
Contact	Katerina Lukatela at Haskins Laboratories
Publication	Applied Psycholinguistics, 16, 463-487.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0992.pdf
Abstract	Adult illiterate and semiliterate speaker of Serbo-Croatian were assessed on reading, writing, phonological, and control tasks. Most subjects had acquired measurable literacy skills despite a documented lack of formal instruction. The individual differences in these skills were highly specific. They were related to measure of phoneme segmentation and alphabet knowledge, but only weakly related to general cognitive abilities. Three group, categorized with respect to the subjects’ ability to identify the letter of their Cyrillic alphabet, differed on phoneme deletion and phoneme-counting tasks, but not on syllable-counting, picture vocabulary, or tone-counting tasks. Alphabet knowledge was more tightly coupled with phoneme awareness than has been found in speakers of English. Cross-language similarities and differences are discussed, highlighting the role that phonological transparency of the orthography may play in the acquisition of literacy.
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