This paper presents the results of a study on the development of literacy in Catalan in pre-school immigrant children living in multilingual contexts. The rnain aim was tofind out whether the linguistic distance between the language spoken ut home and the language spoken ut school influences the processes of literacy. Two groups of children from different linguistic backgrounds were compared: the first comprised 17 children who speak a Romance language which uses Latin script, and the other comprised 18 children who speak a non-Romance language which uses Arabic script. The tasks used involved identification and naming of each of the letters in the Latin alphabet, identification and interpretation of texts. The results point to the existence of a shared body of knowledge of the universe written in the L2 that goes beyond linguistic diversity. However, the children of a non-Romance linguistic origin were more disperse in written tasks as well as in procedures of phonographic correspondence. In this study it is difficult to attribute these differences to transfers between writing systems, given the age of the individuals. They may be due to the process of reflection on the two languages that is the result of the act of learning to write in the language spoken ut school.