When a child masters his/her reading skills, their internal structure usually changes. The consistency of orthography in different languages influences differently the size of the grains in reading development process.
When monitoring the development of reading skills, one should take into account the size of processing units which are employed by a child in converting visual word/letter string into phonological word/phoneme/syllable.  In Russian-speaking children, during the first two years of education, the bigrams (i.e. CV/VC syllables) are the main recoding units. However, some kindergartens in the scope of emergent literacy start from the whole-word reading strategy which is followed by a phonological recoding.
The paper deals with the analysis of reading strategies in Russian-speaking children. The study is based on the individual longitudinal data of 40 typically-developing monolingual subjects who were at the very initial stages of reading development. The subjects were assessed three times by a set of reading tasks which included speech tokens’ repetition and letter, bigram, word, and non-word reading. During the analysis, vocal reaction time, pronunciation time, total reading time, errors’ rate, Index of simultaneity syllable recoding, and ISSG interstimuli variability were evaluated and compared within the samples and among the three assessments.
Our results enabled us to divide the sample into three subgroups according to the reaction time and the pronunciation time. Moreover, two different strategies of mastering reading skills were established; they highlighted a) vocabulary-based and b) phonetic-based approaches to reading development.