Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333 Commonalities and Differences in Word Identification Skills Among Learners of English as a Second Language Min Wang University of Maryland Keiko Koda Carnegie Mellon University This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a nam- ing experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated faster and more accurate naming performance on high-frequency words than low-frequency words and faster and more accurate naming performance on regular words than exception words. Moreover, for both groups, the difference in naming ac- curacies between regular and exception words was more pronounced for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. An L1 effect was observed: The Korean students were overall more accurate than were the Chinese students in naming all categories of words. Furthermore, the Korean students showed a higher percentage of regularization errors in naming low-frequency exception words than did Chinese students. The Korean Min Wang, Department of Human Development; Keiko Koda, Department of Modern Languages. The research reported here was funded in part by a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and in part by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9616519 to Charles A. Perfetti at the University of Pittsburgh. Preparation of the manuscript was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship to the first author. We would like to thank Dorolyn Smith and Lionel Menasche for their assistance in recruiting participants at the University of Pittsburgh, Lacey Lankard for her assistance in data collection, and Megumi Hamada and Karen Shane for scoring and coding the data. Thanks also go to Jennifer Cromley for her editorial comments and Ying Liu for his technical assistance in programming the experiment. We are also grateful to the editor, assistant editor, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an early version of the article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Min Wang, Department of Hu- man Development, University of Maryland, 3304P Benjamin Building, College Park, MD 20742. Internet: minwang@umd.edu Language Learning 57:Suppl. 1, June 2007, pp. 201–222 201 C  2007 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan