This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central to research debates on reading in English, German and French. However, we argue that these innovative approaches to the dynamics of reading in Chinese, Japanese and Korean go far beyond a simple comparative research strategy. Instead, by illuminating phenomena like word segmentation, parafoveal processing and semantic analysis from their unique perspectives, they provide valuable insights into the more general question of to what extent information processing in reading is universal as opposed to language specific. Moreover, we expect that these initial studies will trigger more basic research on non-alphabetic reading, providing a foundation for useful application.