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

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.

Reading aloud in Persian: ERP evidence for an early locus of the masked onset priming effect

“…phonemes that correspond to multiple graphemes) which creates difficulty for spelling but not reading. One example is the phoneme /z/, which may correspond to four different graphemes (e.g ‫ﺫ.‬ -‫ﺯ‬ -‫ﺽ‬ -‫;ﻅ‬ Arab- Moghaddam & Sénéchal, 2001;Rahbari, Sénéchal, & Arab-Moghaddam, 2007). In the current study, we took advantage of the polygraphy in Persian.…”

Reading and spelling acquisition in Thai children

“…In other languages the mapping relationship can be less balanced, for example when there is consistent mapping between phonemes to graphemes but there are multigrapheme to phoneme correspondences. Hence, phonemes can be spelled in multiple ways, which is one of the main reasons why spelling lags behind reading in languages such as French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Persian (Geva et al, 1993;Pinheiro, 1995;Rahbari et al, 2007;Sprenger-Charolles et al, 1998).…”

“…The relationship between reading and spelling Previous research indicates that in languages in which phonemes can be spelled in multiple ways, spelling is likely to lag behind reading (Geva et al, 1993;Rahbari, Sénéchal, & Arab-Moghaddam, 2007;Sprenger-Charolles et al, 1998). As Thai has multigraphemic consonants as well as graphemically complex vowel and tone expressions dependent on well developed, stored orthographic knowledge, we can predict that spelling will lag behind reading in beginning readers.…”

“…For example, when there is consistent mapping between phonemes and graphemes but there are multigrapheme to phoneme correspondences, then spelling development generally lags behind reading (e.g. French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Persian; Geva, Wade-Woolley, & Shany, 1993;Rahbari, Sénéchal, & Arab-Moghaddam, 2007;Pinheiro, 1995;SprengerCharolles, Siegel, & Bonnett, 1998). Thus, predictions can be made about reading and spelling development based on the characteristics of the orthography and the language it maps onto.…”

Reading and spelling development in Persian from grade 1 to grade 4

“…German (Wimmer & Landerl, 1997) show faster rate of spelling development than English children. In particular, findings from within orthographic studies reveal that it is easier to spell a word when each phoneme consistently corresponds to a simple grapheme Reading and Spelling in Persian 18 (Juul, 2005;Rahbari Senechal, & Arab-Moghaddam, 2007). Recently, Juul (2005) examined Danish-speaking children's spelling accuracy based on different levels of orthographic consistency.…”