doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00752 Alphabetism in reading science

There has been mounting concern among social scientists that conclusions from studies conducted on highly educated populations from affluent European cul-tures may have limited applicability to human behavior in general (Henrich et al., 2010). Similar reservations have also been voiced in the fields of language (Evans and Levinson, 2009) and literacy (Share, 2008a; Frost, 2012). Reading research, in particular, has been overwhelmingly dom-inated by work on English, which appears to be an outlier among European alpha-bets (Seymour et al., 2003; Share, 2008a). I have argued that because spelling–sound relations are so complex in English orthog-raphy, much of reading research has been confined to a narrow Anglocentric research agenda addressing theoretical and applied issues with only limited relevance for a universal science of reading and literacy. My intention here is not to reiter-ate my 2008 arguments or even expand them, but to move on to another major obstacle to progress. Before moving on, however, I would like to add a note of optimism to the Anglocentrism debate. In recent years, interest in other languages has indeed begun to emerge from the shadows probably because the scientific community of Anglo-American reading researchers has felt itself “come of age ” as a substantial body of well-replicated and converging findings has coalesced in recent years, at least on several key topics such as word identification and dyslexia (Vellutin