ORIGINAL ARTICLEReading Failure in a Completely TransparentOrthography Representing a Morphologically HighlyComplex Agglutinative Language: the Case of Turkish

This study investigates differences in the word processing skills of students with andwithout reading difficulties who read Turkish, an entirely transparent orthography. Thirty-five students diagnosed as poor readers and 51 typically developing controls were testedacross two experiments, one that assessed theirability to process identicalness of isolatedreal words as opposed to pseudowords and another that assessed their ability to judgesemantic relatedness of two real words. Participants were from two education levels; halfof them were 3rd-4th graders and half were 6th–7th graders. An integrative view of thefindings points to an apparent failure of Turkish poor readers to develop a lexicalizedreading route that mediates word recognition by means of permanent orthographicknowledge. Moreover, their ability to effectively process word letter sequences along anon-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme conversion-based reading route was found to beseriously restricted. Findings are discussed with direct reference to orthographic transpar-ency, dual-route reading theory and the orthographic self-teaching concept.