Why reading is so difficult research

Learning to read is incredibly difficult due to all of the irregularities and complexities of our language, such as letters alone and groups of letters having completely different phonetics. For example, the video uses 'comparison' as an example - each word in 'comparison' can be sounded differently at least twice, most three or four times. This is the case with most, if not all words. The inflectional suffix of 'ough' is especially difficult due to it being pronounced in over 8 different ways, and one researcher talks about how confusing the English language can be to young learners and learners with difficulty, such as the letter 'f' being pronounced as an f in most words, but uses the fricative sound for the word 'of' - the f being pronounced as a 'v'. 
This difficulty and complexity to learn to read the same spellings in different ways can easily lead to problems in written communication and then with social interaction.

Dr. Louisa Moats - "Learning to read an alphabetic orthography is a very artificial and unnatural act".
Dr. Paula Tallal - "Reading is one of the more complicated higher cognitive functions to learn - need to use attention, sequencing, memory, linguistic system, visual systems - they all need to coordinate. The more complicated the translation is from the orthography to the phonology is in a language, the more complicated it is to understand.