Nima Noori; Shahla Raghibdoost
Abstract
Since, based on previous findings, orthographic depth affects the nature of cognitive mechanisms, different patterns can be expected depending on the degrees of transparency or opacity of the orthographic systems of languages. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between ...
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Since, based on previous findings, orthographic depth affects the nature of cognitive mechanisms, different patterns can be expected depending on the degrees of transparency or opacity of the orthographic systems of languages. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and phonological working memory with reading speed and reading accuracy in Persian. The participants included 75 healthy and normal monolingual Persian-speaking children (mean age 121.6 months) studying in Grades 3-5 in Zahedan elementary schools. From each grade, 25 children were selected by purposive sampling. All children belonged to the middle and upper social classes. 9 subtests were administered to the children to measure the variables of IQ, reading speed, reading accuracy, phonological working memory, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. The results indicated that there is a strong and significant relationship between rapid automatized naming and reading speed. The relationship between this variable and reading accuracy was moderate and significant. Phonological awareness had a relatively strong and significant relationship with reading speed and reading accuracy. Phonological working memory had a significant and moderate relationship with reading speed. It did not have a significant relationship with the reading accuracy. Regarding the relationship between these cognitive predictors and reading in Persian, it can be inferred that it is very similar to the relationship between these variables and reading, which has been reported in inconsistent orthographies like English and Hebrew. The results indicate that the cognitive predictors are significantly affected by the orthographic transparency.
Shahnaz Yeganeh
Abstract
Phonological awareness refers to a child’s skill of identifying and changing the components of speech which is represented by the writing system. Many of the studies indicate that phonological awareness is an important element in learning writing. Scripts in which the representation between script ...
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Phonological awareness refers to a child’s skill of identifying and changing the components of speech which is represented by the writing system. Many of the studies indicate that phonological awareness is an important element in learning writing. Scripts in which the representation between script and pronunciation is predictable are transparent scripts, such as Turkish, Italian and Spanish, and scripts in which this representation is unpredictable, such as English, French and Arabic, are blurred scripts. The aim of this research is to achieve a better understanding of the performance of native normal and dyslexic Persian-speaking children through phonological awareness tests and spelling based on the transparency of the Persian script. Therefore, the effect of two variables, that is the level of phonological awareness and transparency of script, on normal and dyslexic children’s writing process was studied, and the findings were compared to those of other studies in this area. In this research, the performance of 10 male native Persian-speaking children (with an average age 9.2 years), diagnosed and under instruction as developmentally dyslexic individuals, was compared to that of 20 male normal native Persian-speaking children (with an average age 9.2 years), who were under instruction in normal schools. The analysis of the resulting data showed that dyslexic children had poorer performances in almost all tests compared to normal children. Results related to the effect of script transparency were consistent with the hypothesis which depended on the script, that is to say performing on phonological awareness tests for blurred words was more difficult for both groups compared to their performances regarding transparent words. Only in the test of producing rhyming words were the performances of the two groups opposite each other, that is normal children produced more blurred rhyming words, and dyslexic children produced a higher number of transparent rhyming words. Since the highest number of normal children’s mistakes in the spelling test were related to phonetic errors, and the highest number of dyslexic children’s mistakes in this test were related to non-phonetic errors, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis of phonological defect.
