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Dyslexia from a Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective: the Case of Russian and Russia Aleksandr N

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Dyslexia from a Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective: the Case of Russian and Russia Aleksandr N Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 8(1), 41–69-, 2010 Copyright @ by LDW 2010 Dyslexia From a Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective: The Case of Russian and Russia Aleksandr N. Kornev St. Petersburg University, Russia Natalia Rakhlin Yale University, USA Elena L. Grigorenko* Yale University, USA Moscow State University, Russia An important goal of research on specific learning disorders (such as dys- lexia, or specific reading disability, or dysgraphia, or specific writing dis- order) is to elucidate the universal characteristics and cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences of literacy acquisition and disability. However, despite the acknowledged necessity of broadening the scope of reading research to include typologically diverse languages, the bulk of reading research has focused on a small group of closely related languages. This paper reviews the characteristics of the Russian language and orthograph- ic system that are relevant to literacy acquisition, approaches to literacy instruction, and dyslexia in Russia, historically and at present, and dis- cusses the potential contributions of Russian language research to the field of reading acquisition and reading disability. lthough the last two decades have produced impressive advances in the field Aof reading acquisition and specific reading disability (SRD or dyslexia), many important key questions remain unresolved. Despite a consensus recognizing the neurobiological nature and genetic origin of SRD, the precise core neurological and cognitive deficits remain a subject of controversy. Identification of susceptibility genes have been complicated by the heterogeneity of the phenotype and its multifactorial etiology. Among debated issues are the role of the discrepancy between reading ability and IQ in defining SRD, the relationship between reading and spelling deficits in SRD and between written and spoken language difficulties in children with SRD, as well as the effect of differing orthographies and approaches to reading instruction that exist in different cultures on the different rates of SRD reported across cultures. Amidst the continuing debate on many issues of theoretical importance, however, a number of points have been established. Thus, it is now widely accepted that SRD involves a deficit in the representation and/or processing of speech sounds (Paulesu et al., 2001; Snowling, 1998). The on-going debate concerns whether the phonological deficit alone can account for the heterogeneous phenotype or whether additional deficits underlie difficulties in SRD, such as visual (Livingstone, Rosen, Drislane, & Galaburda, 1991; Spinelli, De Luca, Judica, & Zoccolotti, 2002); automa- ticity, as posited by the cerebellar theory (Nicolson, Fawcett, & Dean, 2001); or broad- er deficits, as posited by the magnocellular theory (Stein, Talcott, & Witton, 2001). *Please send correspondence to: Elena L. Grigorenko, Yale University, Child Study Center, 230 South Frontage Road, New Haven, CT 06519 Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 8(1), 41-69, 2010 Second, the componential approach to reading recognizes that reading in- volves multiple psychological processes and skills, such as phonemic awareness, let- ter knowledge, phonological coding, orthographic skills, automaticity in processing letter sequences, lexical access, memory—all of which exhibit individual differences and may potentially be a source of differences between those who master literacy skills successfully and those who do not. Third, for languages with alphabetic scripts, it has been determined that the degree to which the orthography approaches or devi- ates from a 1-to-1 grapheme-phoneme correspondence affects the development of word reading accuracy (Goswami, 2002). Finally, recent studies addressing reading disability in languages other than English have shown that despite the differences in the orthographic systems across languages, reading acquisition follows a certain universal developmental trajectory and that language disability shows certain com- mon characteristics, namely a deficit in the representation and processing of speech sounds and the lack of the ability to automatize orthographic sequencing (Grigore- nko, 2001; Ziegler, Perry, Ma-Wyatt, Ladner, & Schulte-Korne, 2003). An important goal remains not only to elucidate more fully the univer- sal characteristics of literacy acquisition and disability, but also to understand how language-specific properties found in typologically different languages (along with different approaches used by different cultures to address literacy acquisition and reading disability) affect the differences in prevalence and manifestation of reading disability found across cultures. Despite the acknowledged necessity to broaden the scope of reading research to include typologically diverse languages, the bulk of read- ing research has focused on a small group of closely related European languages (Ger- manic and Romance, with a few exceptions). One language that has not been widely studied with respect to SRD is Russian. This paper summarizes the characteristics of the Russian language and orthographic system that are relevant to literacy acquisition (including approaches to literacy instruction and SRD in Russia) and reviews the po- tential contributions of Russian language research to the field of reading acquisition and reading disability. russian LanGuaGe anD ALPhabet: DemoGraPhic anD historicaL backGrounD The Russian Federation (hereafter, Russia), with a territory of 17,075,400 square kilometers (6,592,800 sq mi) covering 1/9 of the Earth’s land mass, and a pop- ulation of 142 million people is the largest and the ninth most populous nation in the world. Russia’s landmass spreads across 11 time zones and stretches almost half way around the world connecting two continents, Europe and Asia. Partly because of the large land mass and the size of the population of Russia, and partly because of the country’s history and its past expansion policies, Russian is one of the world’s most commonly spoken languages. Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com) lists Russian as the 8th most widely spoken language in the world. It is one of the 6 official languages (along with Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish) of the United Nations (UN). Russian is also considered the most geographically dispersed language of Eurasia. Outside of the Russian Federation, it is spoken primarily in the former Soviet republics, but is also used by communities of Russian expatriates throughout the world. It is esti- mated that an additional 120,000,000 Russian speakers reside outside of Russia. 42 Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 8(1), 41-69, 2010 The population of Russia is highly diverse, encompassing Russia’s 160 ethnic groups, whose people speak some 100 languages belonging to diverse language fami- lies, some with long traditions of literacy and some with no writing systems of their own. The Russian Constitution gives its 21 autonomous republics the right to insti- tute their native language co-officially next to Russian, even though as of November 2002, all official languages within the Russian Federation are required by law to use the Cyrillic alphabet. For example, in the Republic of Dagestan, children are taught using 9 local languages, newspapers are published in 13 languages, and TV channels broadcast in 11 languages. Given this high degree of linguistic diversity, it is impor- tant to maintain a common language, and this role is fulfilled by Russian, the official state language of the Russian Federation. The 2002 Census data indicated that the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia (98.2%) spoke and read Russian (although only 79.8% of the population were recorded as ethnically Russian). Thus, Russian is the language of cross-cultural communication and literacy in Russia. Russian belongs to the Indo-European language family and is one of the members of the East Slavic languages (along with Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn). Russian is an example of a fairly young language (the predecessor of Russian and other related Slavic languages was in common use by the 5th century AD, when the Common Slavonic speaking people separated into Western, Eastern and Southern groups with the Eastern Slavs settling in the territory of the present-day Ukraine). However, first reliable historical information concerning the East Slavs dates from the 9th century because of the lack of earlier written records (Kiparsky, 1979). The first Slavic writing system is credited to two Slavic-speaking missionar- ies from Salonica (now Thessaloniki), brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who in the year 863 were sent by the Byzantine emperor Michael III to Moravia (now part of the Czech republic) to translate the Gospels into Slavic and develop a writing sys- tem for it. The written language that developed as the result became known as Old Church Slavonic because it was different from any of the Slavic vernacular languages used at the time and was used exclusively for translating liturgical texts and conduct- ing sermons. The alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet, but new letters were invented for those vowels that did not exist in Greek. The original alphabet became later known among Slavic scholars as the Glagolitic script. Cyrillic alphabet was the second Slavic alphabet most likely developed by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius in the 10th century. It was also based on the Greek alphabet and most likely adopted the letters for the Slavic-specific
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