This article intends to show that the study of the activity of the writer informs us about access to the phonographical principle, at least as well as the study of phono-logical awareness. Two research projects are presented, the first one about young children who learn to read, the other one on illiterate adults. They show how these persons are faced with a complex management of phonographical and morphological principles in their writing. The study of phonographical awareness cannot be dissociated from morpho-graphical awareness.

The main organising feature of the Chinese writing system is the ideophonetic compound - that is, a character structure with two elements, a semantic radical, which gives a clue to the meaning of the character, and a phonological component, which gives a clue to the pronunciation. In a previous investigation, it was shown that children use this character structure when learning novel Chinese characters (Tsai & Nunes, in press): pseudo-characters that fit the ideophonetic compound structure were learned more easily than those that violate it, irrespective of the children's age and of testing mode (reading or writing). The aim of this study was to examine further how this character schema affects children's learning by varying the level of agreement between the pseudo-characters and the ideophonetic compound structure and the type of phonological rules used in obtaining pronunciation. In our experiments learning was significantly affected independently by the transparency of the semantic radical and the regularity of the phonological component.

This article deals with the simultaneous acquisition of two scripts, French and Western Armenian, the latter being a diasporic language. The purpose is to define the cognitive behaviour of young beginning reader- writers facing two different alphabetical codes. The study focuses on 15 subjects attending a private Armenian school in France. A comparative analysis of the samples gathered (transverse and longitudinal) from upper kindergarten level to second grade enabled the study of the various aspects of this access to reading and writing in this bilingual context. This reflection allows to make progress in the knowledge of the strategies of the child exposed to biliteracy.