The main purpose of this paperisto briefly review some empiricalfindings on the
processingmechanisms ofskilled readers and beginning readersin Chinese andEnglish and to
compare the learnability of reading in the two languages. In the learning processes, a similar
global-to-analytic developmental path existsin both languages, although there are differencesin
the kinds of predictors of early reading acquisition. It is argued that while Chinese-English
orthography differences have some effect on the learning and processingmechanismsfollowed,
the effect does not amount to making one system as a whole easier and faster to process or to
learn than the other.postprin
