Orthographic and phonological processing skills in reading and spelling in Persian/English bilinguals

Abstract

The concurrent development of reading and spelling in English and Persian were examined in a sample of bilingual children. The objective was to compare how phonological and orthographic processing skills contribute to reading and spelling for two alphabetic languages that differ drastically. English orthography is characterised by both polyphony (i.e., a grapheme representing more than one phoneme) and polygraphy (i.e., a phoneme represented by more than one grapheme) which results in a complex script to read and write. In contrast, vowelised-Persian orthography is characterised by polygraphy only, which results in a simple script to read but more complex to write. Fifty-five Iranian children in grades 2 and 3, who had lived in English-speaking Canada for an average of 4 years, were tested on word reading and spelling in English and Persian. We found that the predictors of reading performance were similar across languages: Phonological and orthographic processing skills each predicted unique variance in word reading in English and in Persian once we had controlled for grade level, vocabulary, and reading experience. As expected, the predictors of spelling performance differed across language: Spelling in English was predicted similarly by phonological and orthographic processing skills, whereas spelling in Persian was predicted by orthographic processing skills only. It is possible that the nature of the Persian orthography encourages children to adopt different strategies when reading and spelling words. Spelling Persian words might be particularly conducive to using an analytic strategy which, in turn, promotes the development of and reliance on orthographic skills.