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.
