Learning to read and spell in Persian: A cross-sectional study from Grades 1 to 4.

Abstract

We investigated the reading and spelling development of 140 Persian children attending Grades 1-4 in Iran. Persian has very consistent letter-sound correspondences, but it varies in transparency because 3 of its 6 vowel phonemes are not marked with letters. Persian also varies in spelling consistency because 6 phonemes have more than one orthographic representation. We tested whether lexicality effects-an advantage of words over nonwords-would be affected be reading transparency and spelling consistency. We found that children became more efficient readers and spellers across grades, with the greatest growth occurring between Grades 1 and 2. For reading, lexicality effects were present with transparent words starting in Grade 2, but lexicality effects with opaque words were not yet present in Grade 4. As expected, the size of transparency effects for reading decreased across grades. For spelling, however, there was no lexicality effect for either consistent or inconsistent words. Moreover, consistency effects were large and did not decrease systematically across grades. Most interesting from a developmental perspective was the finding that both reading transparency and spelling polygraphy affected reading as well as spelling in Grades 1 and 2, but the word characteristics had differential effects as a function of literacy task in Grades 3 and 4. This pattern highlights the vulnerability of children's representations and processes during the early phases of acquisition as well as the rapidity with which representations and processes become specialized as a function of the literacy task at hand.

The development of a measure of root awareness to account for reading performance in the Arabic language: A development and validation study

“…sequence. The sequential order of the root’s consonants, as they appear in their derivatives, allows for a well-defined orthographic representation (Ehri, 1992, 2005, 2017; Perfetti, 1992; Rahbari & Sénéchal, 2010; Share, 1999; Taha & Saiegh-Haddad, 2017; Tibi, 2016). As a further illustration, Table 1 shows examples of words derived from three different root structures.…”

Growth of Word and Pseudoword Reading Efficiency in Alphabetic Orthographies: Impact of Consistency

“…Raw score effects may be misleading because English readers may show greater variation in both word and pseudoword reading than readers of more consistent orthographies, in particular when the consistent-orthography groups show ceiling effects in accuracy, as is often the case. In one of the few single-language studies investigating the development of the lexicality effect, Rahbari and Sénéchal (2010) contrasted first to fourth graders' reading efficiency of transparent (consistent) and opaque (inconsistent) words and pseudowords in the relatively consistent Farsi orthography. Taking the view that successful reading experience drives the lexicalization of printed words, which in turn facilitates word recognition, these authors predicted that children would demonstrate lexicality effects of increasing magnitude from second grade onward for words with the most transparent mappings, because transparency should accelerate the establishment of lexicalized representations.…”

Aphasia in Persian: Implications for cognitive models of lexical processing

“…We expected acquired impairment in reading (dyslexia) to be co‐incident with impaired picture naming (anomia) and a dissociation whereby impairments would be observed with preserved comprehension. We also expected reading of opaque words to be more affected than transparent words by aphasia following studies of reading in Persian (Baluch, ; Baluch & Shahidi, ; Rahbari & Senechal, , ) including developmental dyslexia (Baluch & Danaye‐Tousi, ; Pouretemad, Khatibi, Zarei, & Stein, ). As in other Semitic scripts, we expected reading disorders to resemble the patterns of deep, phonological, and surface dyslexia already reported in Arabic and Hebrew (Beland & Mimouni, ; Friedman & Haddad‐Hanna, ).…”