This study examines reading acquisition in French as a Foreign Language by Croatian early learners (9-11 y.), beginners in L2 French. Designed under the cognitive perspective of foreign language learning/teaching, the thesis is divided in three parts. The first one sets the theoretical framework of the research by presenting relevant issues in fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics and foreign language acquisition and teaching. Firstly, we are dealing with the phonological and orthographic correspondences in Croatian and in French. Subsequently, we are discussing the pertinence of different psycholinguistic reading models, followed by a presentation of the concept of working memory in relation with respect to the learning processes. The second section describes the psycholinguistic experimental study undertaken in order to highlight phonological loop's influence on Repeating and Reading Aloud activities by targeting presumably difficult phonemes for Croatian native speakers. Lastly, the third part ponders over the results which are providing several implications for foreign language acquisition and teaching, notably those concerning the role and status of written language in literacy access practices in a foreign language.
