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The role of orthographic and phonological processing skills in the reading and spelling of monolingual Persian children

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Abstract

The main objective of the present study was to examine the contribution of phonological and orthographic skills to Persian reading and spelling. The Persian language is of interest because it has very consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, but somewhat inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. Reading, spelling, phonological, and orthographic skills were tested in a sample of 109 monolingual Persian students (mean age = 8;1, SD = 4 mo) attending Grade 2 in Iran. The results showed that although monolingual Persian children relied both on phonological and orthographic skills, phonological skills were a strong predictor for both reading and spelling. Another objective of the study was to compare children’s spelling performance in terms of phoneme-to-grapheme (PG) consistencies. As expected, children spelled PG-consistent words more accurately than PG-inconsistent words. Moreover, they relied more on orthographic skills for spelling PG-inconsistent words than for spelling PG-consistent words. The results are discussed in terms of the differential effect of orthographic consistency on reading and spelling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1S 5B6

    Noriyeh Rahbari & Monique Sénéchal

  2. Iranian Academic Centre for Education, Culture & Research (ACECR)-Fars Branch, Shiraz, Iran

    Narges Arab-Moghaddam

Authors
  1. Noriyeh Rahbari
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  2. Monique Sénéchal
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  3. Narges Arab-Moghaddam
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Correspondence to Noriyeh Rahbari.

Appendices

Appendix A

List of words used to test Persian reading and spelling

Appendix B

List of pseudowords used to test phonological processing skills

Appendix C

List of words and pseudohomophones used to test orthographic processing skills

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Rahbari, N., Sénéchal, M. & Arab-Moghaddam, N. The role of orthographic and phonological processing skills in the reading and spelling of monolingual Persian children. Read Writ 20, 511–533 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-006-9042-x

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