Chinese Reading Development in Monolingual and Bilingual Learners: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue was inspired by the Research in Reading Chinese Conference held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the University of Toronto, in 2010 to celebrate Dr. Richard C. Anderson's distinguished research career and his pioneering role in Chinese reading research. The five articles presented in this special issue cover topics related to the Chinese reading development of monolingual and bilingual learners. They include similarities and differences between Chinese and English in reading development and processes (Perfetti, Cao, & Booth, 2013) and reading problems (McBride-Chang et al., 2013), the role of visual-perceptual and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading (Anderson et al., 2013; Luo, Chen, Deacon, Zhang, & Yin, 2013), and the influence of first-language semantics on second-language lexical learning (Saji & Imai, 2013). The findings of these articles highlight the contribution of Chinese reading research to the scientific study of reading.