The development of visual search strategies in biscriptal readers

Abstract

In visual search tasks, skilled adult readers of English process letters of the alphabet differently from other symbols (Hammond & Green, 1982; Mason, 1982). Less skilled (young) readers of English, and skilled readers of logographic scripts, do not show this differential processing across stimuli (Green, Hammond, & Supramaniam, 1983; Green & Meara, 1987). To test whether cognitive processing in bilinguals depends upon script combinations and language proficiency, we investigated the development of alphabetic and logographic visual search strategies in two kinds of biscriptals: Malay-English and Chinese-English readers. Our results support the view that there are scriptspecific and reader-specific differences amongst bilingual biscriptals. The implications of these effects for dual-route models of reading and stage models of reading acquisition are discussed.