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Learning to Read and Spell in Persian: A Cross-Sectional Study From Grades 1

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Developmental Psychology
Learning to Read and Spell in Persian: A Cross-Sectional Study
From Grades 1 to 4
Noriyeh Rahbari, and Monique Sénéchal
Online First Publication, August 2, 2010. doi: 10.1037/a0020377

CITATION
Rahbari, N., & Sénéchal, M. (2010, August 2). Learning to Read and Spell in Persian: A
Cross-Sectional Study From Grades 1 to 4. Developmental Psychology. Advance online
publication. doi: 10.1037/a0020377
Developmental Psychology © 2010 American Psychological Association
2010, Vol. ●●, No. ●, 000 – 000 0012-1649/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0020377

Learning to Read and Spell in Persian:

A Cross-Sectional Study From Grades 1 to 4

Noriyeh Rahbari and Monique Sénéchal

Carleton University

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.

Keywords: reading, spelling, acquisition, Persian, consistency

Skilled readers make efficient use of phonological, ortho-
graphic, and semantic representations to extract meaning from
written texts. How children acquire these representations and how
these representations become interconnected has been of interest
for more than 100 years now (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky,
& Seidenberg, 2001). Advances in our understanding are being
made, and developmental models are being proposed (e.g., Share,
1999). Most interesting is the fact that we are now testing the limits
of models elaborated to account for findings in English to other
orthographies (e.g., Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Ziegler & Gos-
wami, 2005). In the present study, we examined whether specific
characteristics of the Persian orthographic system would affect the
acquisition of reading and spelling in Persian, a language that has
received little attention to date.
Learning to read in alphabetic languages is complex, as evi-
denced by the diversity of models elaborated. Although stage-
models of reading propose qualitative shifts in children’s strategy
use (e.g., Frith, 1985; Gough & Juel, 1991), alternative views
propose gradual quantitative changes as children become increas-
ingly sensitive to the internal structure of written words as well as
to the correspondences between letters or groups of letters in
words and their pronunciation (Rayner et al., 2001). There seems
Noriyeh Rahbari and Monique Sénéchal, Department of Psychology,
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Noriyeh
Rahbari, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario
K1S 5B6, Canada. E-mail: nrahbari@connect.carleton.ca
to be agreement, however, that phonological and orthographic
processes develop interdependently and that phonological recod-
ing plays a critical role in the development of well-defined ortho-
graphic representations (Bowey & Muller, 2005; Cunningham,
Perry, Stanovich, & Share, 2002; Kyte & Johnson, 2006; Share,
1999).
Perfetti (1992) proposed that as children learn to read, the
orthographic representations of words become increasingly spe-
cific (i.e., more correct letters represented in their correct position)
and become redundant with the phonological representations of the
words (also see Ehri, 1992). As more and more words become
well-specified orthographically and redundant phonologically (i.e.,
stronger associations between orthographic and phonological rep-
resentations), reading becomes less effortful. This framework has
been used to explain individual differences in reading (Perfetti &
Hart, 2001), but it can also be applied to examine cross-linguistic
differences in the acquisition of reading. It is possible that the
acquisition of well-defined orthographic representations varies as a
function of the transparency of writing systems (e.g., Defior,
Martos, & Cary, 2002; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).
Children who learn to read in transparent orthographies—when
letter–sound correspondences are consistent—acquire reading
faster in comparison with children who learn to read orthographies
that have less direct and more equivocal letter–sound correspon-
dences (e.g., Bruck, Genesee, & Caravolas, 1997; Goswami,
Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003). For instance, children learn-
ing to read in transparent orthographic systems, such as Finnish,
German, or Dutch, show higher accuracy (Aro & Wimmer, 2003)
and faster reading rates (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003) than

1
2 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL
children learning to read in less transparent orthographies, such as
English.
Even though transparent orthographies seem to ease reading
acquisition, transparent orthographies also have peculiarities that
can affect performance. For instance, languages such as Arabic
and Persian can be viewed as transparent languages because they
have very consistent letter–sound correspondences; yet, these lan-
guages do not mark with letters some vowel phonemes. As a
consequence of this peculiarity, many words in these languages are
represented as a series of consonants. Abu-Rabia has examined the
issue of the presence and absence of vowels in numerous studies of
reading in Arabic (for a review, see Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006). The
findings are clear: Readers are slower and more error prone when
reading words with vowels omitted as compared with reading the
same words that included diacritics placed on consonants to mark
the vowel phoneme. The pattern applies to adult and children
readers as well as to skilled and poor readers. The daily experi-
ences of Arabic (and Persian) readers, however, include texts
without diacritics for vowels. Therefore, we contend that it is
essential to conduct research comparing real words for which
vowels are not marked with real words for which vowels have a
corresponding letter. Rahbari and Sénéchal (2009) developed such
a paradigm for adult readers of Persian that was used in the present
study.
In contrast to research on children’s reading development, chil-
dren’s spelling has not been studied extensively. Nonetheless,
there are some cross-orthographic studies showing that children
learning to spell in consistent orthographies, such as Czech (Cara-
volas & Bruck, 1993) or German (Wimmer & Landerl, 1997),
show faster rates of spelling development than English children. In
addition, within-orthographic studies reveal that it is easier to spell
a word when each phoneme consistently corresponds to a single
graphemic representation as opposed to words with two or more
plausible spellings (Caravolas, Kessler, Hulme, & Snowling, 2005;
Juul, 2005). Thus, children’s spelling accuracy appears to be
affected by phoneme-to-grapheme consistency. In the present re-
search, the effect of spelling consistency was tracked across
Grades 1– 4. Presumably, a consistency effect should be stronger
in the earlier grades because orthographic representations are not
yet well defined.
Reading and Spelling in Persian
The Persian orthography has consistent letter–sound correspon-
dences because each grapheme has a single pronunciation, but
Persian is not entirely transparent because three of its six vowels
are not represented with letters (for a thorough description of
Persian, see Baluch, 2006). Specifically, the vowels /æ/, /e/, and /o/
are not represented by letters or diacritics after the first year of
reading instruction (with the exceptions of poetic texts or to
disambiguate a word in a text). In contrast, the vowels /â/, /i/, and
/u/ are always represented by letters as a fixed part of the words.
Hence, words, or syllables within words, that have unmarked
vowels are spelled as a sequence of consonants. Further, these
words can have a unique orthographic representation when a single
word corresponds to the sequence of consonants. For example, the
consonant sequence srd represents the word cold in Persian and
can only be pronounced correctly as /særd/. Alternatively, a con-
sonant sequence can be ambiguous or homographic when multiple
words have the same orthographic representation and, conse-
quently, would require additional contextual information to be
read. Homographs can be represented in English with the sequence
bd that could represent the words bid, bad, or bed. In the present
research, no ambiguous words were used. Specifically, all stimuli
in the present study had a single correct pronunciation, a single
correct spelling, and a single meaning, as in the example for the
Persian word for cold. Moreover, the words consisted of a single
morpheme. Persian words for which all phonemes are represented
with letters were labeled transparent words, and the words that
include vowels not represented by letters were labeled opaque
words. The term “transparency” rather than consistency was se-
lected to highlight the presence or absence of a vowel letter in
Persian that can result in ambiguity, not inconsistency. Transparent
and opaque words were matched on acoustic duration, frequency,
and initial consonant. The words were also matched on number of
letters with the consequence that opaque words had an additional
consonant.
Another key characteristic of the Persian orthography is the
relative inconsistency of the sound–letter correspondences. In Per-
sian, there are six phonemes that can be marked by more than one
consonant letter. Specifically, the phoneme /z/ can be represented
by four different letters; /s/ can be represented by three different
letters; and /t/, /h/, /a/, and /gh/ can each be represented by two
different letters. Obtaining the correct spelling of words that con-
tain these polygraphic phonemes requires reliance on orthographic
knowledge. In the present study, Persian polygraphic (or incon-
sistent) words were those for which more than one letter can
represent the same phoneme, whereas monographic (or consistent)
words did not have alternative plausible spelling, and each pho-
neme corresponded to a single grapheme.
In Iran, formal schooling starts when children are 6 years of age,
and elementary schools go to Grade 5. Some schools have kinder-
garten, but it is not mandatory to attend, and emergent literacy is
not part of the kindergarten program. From Grade 1 onward,
reading is taught with the same series of books in schools through-
out the country. The first-grade book contains lessons introducing
one or two letters along with sentences, and eventually passages,
containing words with the featured letters. In contrast to English,
in which both letter names and sounds are taught to children, in
Persian only letter sounds are formally taught. In the first half of
the first-grade book, diacritics are used to mark missing vowels,
but diacritics are usually omitted in the second half of the book.
The most typical teaching approach in Iran is a combination of
phonics and whole-word instruction. The structure of the books for
Grades 2–5 is the same across grades in that each lesson starts with
a passage, followed by comprehension questions and vocabulary
definitions among other activities. Writing is taught with its own
series of books that focus on spelling, handwriting, as well as
sentence or short essay writing depending on grade level. When
spelling to dictation in Grade 1, children are not required to use
diacritics.
Given that the same books are used for all children, we were
able to assess children’s relative exposure to transparent and
opaque words as well as to monographic and polygraphic words.
To do so, we analyzed 12 texts from Grades 2–5. For each grade,
a text from the beginning, middle, and the end of the reading book
was selected, and all one- and two-syllable words were extracted.
Of the 529 one- and two-syllable words found, 27% were trans-
 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN
parent, 34% were opaque, and the remaining 39% were two-
syllable words that included one transparent and one opaque
syllable. Moreover, 51% of the 529 words extracted were poly-
graphic words, and 49% were monographic words. Hence, we
concluded that elementary school children were as likely to read
transparent and opaque words as well as monographic and poly-
graphic words.
Reading and spelling in Persian children and adults have been
examined in a limited number of studies (Arab-Moghaddam &
Sénéchal, 2001; Gholamain & Geva, 1999). For instance, Rahbari,
Sénéchal, and Arab-Moghaddam (2007) reported that the unique
contribution of phonological skills (18% and 17% for reading and
spelling, respectively) was substantially higher than that of ortho-
graphic skills (3% and 6% for reading and spelling, respectively)
in second-grade children’s reading and spelling. In contrast to
reading in childhood, adult readers of Persian seem to rely on
orthographic representations, as is suggested by the presence of
frequency effects (Baluch, 1993; Baluch & Besner, 1991; Nassaji
& Geva, 1999) and lexicality effects (Rahbari & Sénéchal, 2009).
Taken together, the findings reviewed above suggest that phono-
logical recoding plays an important role in Persian children’s
reading but that orthographic representations are salient in Persian
adults’ word naming. The extant research, however, is limited
because it does not represent the developmental pattern of skills
used to read—the main goal of the present research.
The Present Study
The main objective of the present study was to document the
progression of Persian reading and spelling across the first four
years of instruction. In the present study, children read and spelled
words and nonwords to test for the presence of lexicality effects. If
orthographic representations are readily available, real words
should be read and spelled faster and more accurately than non-
words because nonwords do not have an orthographic representa-
tion and, consequently, require phonological processing. Of spe-
cial interest was the description of the effect of the orthographic
peculiarities of Persian on the magnitude of lexicality effects. It
was predicted that the magnitude of the lexicality effect should
increase with grade levels but that the developmental course
should be affected by the transparency of grapheme–phoneme
correspondences for reading and by the consistency of phoneme–
grapheme correspondences for spelling. Hence, we tested for lex-
icality effects for reading transparent and opaque words separately,
and for spelling monographic and polygraphic words separately.
We also indexed the developmental course of transparency effects
(transparent vs. opaque words) for Persian reading and consistency
effects (polygraphic vs. monographic words) for Persian spelling.
It was expected that the size of the transparency effects for reading
and that the size of the consistency effects for spelling would
decrease across grades.
Method
Participants
A total of 140 monolingual Persian children attending Grades
1– 4 in Tehran, Iran, participated in this study. There were 35
children (57% girls) in Grade 1 with a mean age of 7;0 ([years;
3
months] SD ⫽ 3 months), 35 children (53% girls) in Grade 2 with
a mean age of 8;0 (SD ⫽ 3 months), 35 children (54% girls) in
Grade 3 with a mean age of 8;11 (SD ⫽ 4 months), and 34 children
(53% girls) in Grade 4 with a mean age of 10;6 (SD ⫽ 5 months).
Another child in Grade 4 did not complete all required tasks, and
her partial data were not included. The children were recruited
from six classrooms for each grade located in three public schools:
two schools for girls and one school for boys.
Parental education ranged from not having completed high
school to completing postgraduate degrees. The distribution of
educational levels was as follows: 16% of mothers and 19% of
fathers had not completed high school, 63% of mothers and 43%
of fathers received a high school diploma, 20% of mothers and
32% of fathers completed college or university, and 1% of mothers
and 6% of fathers completed postgraduate studies.
According to their classroom teachers, all participating students
had above average reading and spelling ability and had no cogni-
tive or psychological difficulties. Also, all children were native
speakers of Persian and had normal or corrected to normal vision.
Moreover, although it was not possible to match children across
grades on the basis of their IQ scores because of the unavailability
of a standardized IQ test, all children who participated in the
present study had general averages of 85% in all subjects, includ-
ing reading and spelling. Note that there is a formal general
academic examination every 3 months in Iranian schools.
Measures
The measures used in the present study were identical to those
in Rahbari and Sénéchal’s (2009) study with adults, and it is their
description that is generally reproduced here with permission from
Elsevier. Participants read and spelled the same 56 words and 38
nonwords. For both reading and spelling tasks, latencies and error
rates were measured. Latencies were the primary dependent mea-
sure because of the high accuracy rates found in other research on
Persian (Rahbari et al., 2007) and because latencies have been
measured successfully in young elementary school children, in-
cluding first-grade children (e.g., Kerek & Niemi, 2009; Pinheiro,
1995). Whenever possible, latency analyses were supplemented
with error analyses. An explanation of the process of word selec-
tion and word type as well as the construction of nonwords
follows.
Word stimuli.
Word type. Participants read and spelled the same 56 real
words to provide an equivalent measure of reading and spelling
(see Appendix A). The word types were obtained by crossing
reading transparency with spelling consistency. Reading transpar-
ency included two levels: Transparent words were those for which
all phonemes were represented with letters, whereas opaque words
were those that included vowel phonemes that were not repre-
sented with letters. Spelling consistency also included two levels:
monographic words included phonemes with unique consistent
orthographic representations, whereas polygraphic words included
phonemes with multiple plausible letters and, therefore, inconsis-
tent orthographic representations. This crossing of reading trans-
parency and spelling consistency yielded 14 words that were
transparent and monographic, 14 words that were transparent and
polygraphic, 14 words that were opaque and monographic, and 14
words that were opaque and polygraphic. Thus, the 56 words
4 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL
included a total of 28 transparent words and 28 opaque words for
analyzing reading transparency, or, for analyzing spelling consis-
tency, 28 monographic and 28 polygraphic words. Half of the
polygraphic words contained two polygraphic letters, and half
contained one polygraphic letter.
Word selection and characteristics. The words were selected
from the Persian schoolbooks used in Grades 1–5. All words had
a single correct pronunciation, a single correct spelling, a single
meaning, and a single morpheme. The 56 items were three-letter
monosyllabic words. The transparent and opaque words had the
same number of letters but had different orthographic structures:
transparent words were CVC, whereas opaque words were CCC
with an unmarked vowel pronounced after the initial consonant
(i.e., /CVCC/). Most important, the transparent and opaque words
were matched on acoustic duration to ensure that the differences in
coda complexity (/VC/ vs. /VCC/) did not result in longer pronun-
ciations. Word types were also matched on frequency (see Table 1)
and initial consonant onset. There were no statistically significant
differences for acoustic duration or frequency when comparing
transparent and opaque words as well as when comparing poly-
graphic and monographic words.
Because objective word-frequency norms are not available for
Persian, the procedure used to index word frequency is described
in detail. First, 300 one- and two-syllable words were selected
from Persian school books for Grades 1–5. Second, 10 teachers
judged the frequency of each item in written or spoken Persian on
a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (infrequent words) to 7 (very
frequent words). This method of word-frequency assessment has
been previously used by other researchers (e.g., Baluch & Besner,
2001; Frost et al., 1987; Ziegler, Ferrand, & Montant, 2004). The
resulting frequency for each word was averaged across teachers.
Third, items rated at the end points of the rating scales (i.e., 1 or
7) were excluded to ensure that items were not too familiar or too
rare. Fourth, words in each category were matched as closely as
possible on frequency level. Fifth, to ensure that the selected words
were within the spoken vocabularies of first-grade children, we
asked three first-grade teachers to verify the familiarity of words
for first-grade children. If a word was identified as unfamiliar to
first-grade children, it was replaced with a familiar word, and the
evaluation was repeated. Finally, 15 skilled readers rated the
frequency of each item in the final list of 56 words as a second
source of frequency ratings. The frequency ratings from teachers
and skilled readers were highly correlated, r(54) ⫽ .70, p ⬍ .01.
The averaged frequencies obtained from teachers and acoustic
durations are reported for each word in Appendix A and across
word types in Table 1.
Table 1
Mean (and Standard Deviation) Frequency and Duration (in Milliseconds) of Words as a
Function of Reading Transparency and Spelling Consistency
Reading transparency
Variable Transparent
Frequencya 3.48 (0.89)
Duration 731 (0.09)
a
On a 7-point rating scale ranging from 1 (rare) to 7 (frequent).
Nonword stimuli. Children read and spelled the same 38
nonwords. All nonwords were transparent in terms of reading and
were monographic in terms of spelling. That is, all nonwords had
vowels marked with letters, and none included polygraphic pho-
nemes. Also, nonwords were decodable and had a legal orthogra-
phy (see Appendix B). The nonwords had the same CVC ortho-
graphic structure as the transparent words. The construction and
selection of nonwords was as follows. First, nonwords were con-
structed from real words by changing the initial and/or the final
consonant or by replacing a long vowel with another long vowel.
The goal was for the nonwords to have little resemblance to real
Persian words to force participants to rely on phonological pro-
cessing rather than an analogy strategy to read and spell them. The
list of nonwords was then examined by three educated native
speakers of Persian to assess nonword resemblance to real words.
If a nonword was identified as similar to a real word in Farsi or any
other minority language in Iran, it was replaced, and the evaluation
was repeated.
Nonword reading accuracy was the number of items for which
participants blended correctly all decoded letters into their corre-
sponding sounds, and nonword spelling accuracy corresponded to
the number of items for which participants wrote correctly the
sequence of letters that captured the phonology of pronounced
nonwords.
Procedure and Apparatus
Participants were tested individually in a quiet room in their
schools. The reading tasks were administered at least 1 week
before the spelling tasks to prevent any visual or auditory residual
effects. Task administration was not counterbalanced because a
previous study showed that children who spelled words first per-
formed better on reading, whereas the reverse was not true (Rah-
bari et al., 2007). Likewise, the word list was presented before the
nonword list for both reading and spelling to prevent participants
from extending their use of phonological recoding to reading and
spelling real words (Baluch & Besner, 1991). There was a 5–10-
min pause between the presentation of words and nonwords for
children in Grades 2– 4 in both reading and spelling tasks, but
children in Grade 1 performed all tasks (reading words, reading
nonwords, spelling words, spelling nonwords) in separate sessions.
In the present study, data for children in Grade 2 onward were
collected in the middle of the school year, whereas data for
children in Grade 1 were collected at the end of the school year
because children in Grade 1 typically complete letter learning at
the end of the academic year.
Spelling consistency
Opaque Monographic Polygraphic
3.51 (0.67) 3.48 (0.92) 3.29 (0.61)
737 (0.09) 738 (0.09) 730 (0.08)
 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN
The procedure used in the present study was identical to that in
Rahbari and Sénéchal’s (2009) study, and it is their description that
is reproduced here with permission from Elsevier. The presenta-
tion order of the 56 words was random because studies have shown
that blocking stimuli by type might induce the use of certain
processes or strategies (e.g., Kinoshita, Lupker, & Rastle, 2004;
Raman, Baluch, & Besner, 2004). Moreover, the random presen-
tation of transparent and opaque words is closer to an ordinary
reading situation because the Persian orthography typically con-
tains a mixture of transparent and opaque words.
We administered both reading and spelling tasks on a computer
using the SuperLab program, Version 4.0. For reading, all stimuli
were presented in a 24-point font size on the center of the com-
puter screen. A visual ready signal, a “⫹” sign, was presented at
the center of the computer screen for 500 ms followed by an item
that remained on the screen until a participant read the item. The
experimental sessions began by the presentation of practice items,
either six words or six nonwords, to familiarize the participants
with the procedures for each task. Participants were instructed to
read aloud each item that appeared on the monitor as quickly and
correctly as possible. A timer began recording the reading latencies
when the stimulus appeared on the monitor and ended when the
experimenter pressed either a yes or a no button to indicate correct
or incorrect responses, respectively. Therefore, correct and incor-
rect responses were also recorded. The experimenter was trained
not to look at the computer screen but to listen carefully to a
participant and to press the yes or no button as soon as the
participant responded. Although using voice-key activation is the
standard in word-reading research, pilot research clearly showed
that using a voice detector with young participants tested in
schools proved highly unreliable.
Audio-recordings of the words were presented via the computer
for the spelling tasks. Each participant and the experimenter heard,
at the same time, the auditory stimulus through headphones. Par-
ticipants were asked to write down the stimulus on a sheet of paper
as fast and as correctly as possible after hearing the stimulus. There
were six practice items for the word and the nonword tasks. The
computer program was set up to record the spelling latencies
between the auditory presentation of the stimuli until the experi-
menter pressed a keyboard key to stop the timer to indicate that the
participant started writing the target stimulus. When the participant
finished writing an item, the experimenter pressed another key on
the keyboard to present the next auditory stimulus. Spelling onset
was measured on the basis of the assumption that phonological and
orthographic representations would be activated immediately after
Table 2
Reading Mean Correct Latencies in Milliseconds (and Standard Deviation) and Mean
Percentage of Errors (and Standard Deviation) for Nonwords, Transparent Words, and Opaque
Words as a Function of Grade
Latencies
Grade Nonword Transparent Opaque
1 1,814 (327) 1,848 (384) 3,030 (571)
2 1,592 (232) 1,455 (248) 2,044 (482)
3 1,414 (237) 1,240 (204) 1,685 (354)
4 1,311 (185) 1,058 (152) 1,317 (225)
5
hearing the word to be spelled. Also, measuring spelling onsets
avoided any confounds with differences in calligraphic speed.
Given that orthographic representations for inconsistently spelled
words would be less well-specified, spelling onsets for polygraphic
words should be slower than for monographic words. Finally, the
instructions for nonwords stipulated that the stimuli were nonsense
words and that participants should read or spell them as fast and as
correctly as possible.
Results
Preliminary analyses confirmed the absence of outliers and
speed–accuracy tradeoffs. All reading and spelling latencies were
within three standard deviations from the participant and the item
means. Moreover, there were strong positive correlation coeffi-
cients between latencies and error rates, rs(92) ⫽ .73 and .75, p ⬍
.01, for reading and for spelling, respectively.
We performed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) using partici-
pants (F1) and items (F2) as the unit of analysis separately for
reading and spelling. These analyses were performed both on
latencies and error rates. Latency analyses were based on correct
mean latencies. That is, responses for mispronunciations (5%) or
misspellings (9%) were excluded in the latency analyses. In addi-
tion, the association between word frequency and latencies was
examined to provide support for variance analyses. As proposed by
Perfetti (1992), children build more specific orthographic repre-
sentations of words on the basis of their reading experience for that
word, and as such, it is assumed that orthographic processes are
sensitive to the frequency of each word, whereas phonological
processes are not. Throughout the Results section, ps ⬍ .01 unless
otherwise indicated, and effect sizes (␩2) as well as 95% lower and
upper confidence intervals are reported where appropriate. Anal-
yses were conducted to test (a) developmental trends, (b) lexicality
effects, and (c) transparency and polygraphy effects.
Reading Performance
Mean latencies and error rates for reading transparent words,
opaque words, as well as nonwords are presented in Table 2.
Latency analyses. To analyze children’s reading speed, we
conducted a 4 ⫻ 3 mixed-factor ANOVA with grade (four levels:
Grades 1– 4) as the between-subjects factor and stimuli (three
levels: transparent word, opaque word, and nonword) as the
within-subject factor. As indicated in Table 2, older children read
faster than did younger children. Indeed, the ANOVA revealed a
% Error
Nonword Transparent Opaque
5.11 (4.77) 1.62 (3.16) 22.55 (10.60)
1.80 (2.83) 1.12 (1.89) 14.69 (9.93)
0.23 (0.98) 0.41 (1.44) 12.55 (9.50)
0.23 (0.99) 0.31 (1.84) 4.31 (3.81)
6 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL
significant main effect of grade, F1(3, 135) ⫽ 75.66, ␩2 ⫽ .63;
F2(3, 91) ⫽ 573.29. Follow-up analyses showed that both linear
and quadratic trends were significant. Although children read
faster with each passing grade, the quadratic trend is due to the fact
that the greatest increase in speed occurred between children in
Grade 1 (M ⫽ 2,231 ms) and the remaining children (Ms ⫽ 1,697,
1,446, and 1,229 ms for Grades 2, 3, and 4, respectively).
There was also a significant main effect of stimuli, F1(2, 135) ⫽
576.66, ␩2 ⫽ .81; F2(2, 91) ⫽ 93.41, as well as a Grade ⫻ Stimuli
interaction, F1(6, 135) ⫽ 90.76, ␩2 ⫽ .67; F2(6, 91) ⫽ 80.39.
These results suggested that children’s reading speed differed on
the basis of stimuli type across the grades, and, consequently,
lexicality effects were tested for each grade separately. Lexicality
effects were examined with contrasts comparing nonwords with
transparent and opaque words, respectively. Indeed, lexicality ef-
fects were present for transparent word reading from Grade 2
onward. As indicated in Table 2, starting in Grade 2, children read
transparent words significantly faster than nonwords, Fs1(1, 34 [1,
33 for Grade 4]) ⫽ 27.25, 55.35, and 175.23; 95% CIs [75, 172;
117, 206; and 207, 283]; Fs2(1, 64) ⫽ 9.15, 35.38, and 89.88 for
Grades 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Children in Grade 1 read trans-
parent words as fast as nonwords (F1,2 ⬍ 1). Moreover, the
examination of the effect sizes as well as the differences between
transparent word and nonword reading revealed that the magnitude
of lexicality effects increased across grades (␩s2 ⫽ .06, .45, .63, and
.84, and ds ⫽ 34, 137, 174, and 253 ms for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4,
respectively). The greatest period of growth was between Grades
1 and 2.
As shown in Table 2, opaque words were never read faster than
nonwords in any grade, although the effect sizes reflecting the
differences between opaque word and nonword reading decreased
at each grade (␩s2 ⫽ .92, .67, .65, and .05, and ds ⫽ 1,216, 452,
271, and 6 ms for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively). It is
important to note the remarkable decrease in differences across
grades, such that by Grade 4, children read opaque words as fast as
nonwords. Again, the greatest period of growth was between
Grades 1 and 2.
The next series of analyses tested for the presence of transpar-
ency effects. Because these analyses excluded nonwords, the anal-
yses acknowledged the fact that the real word stimuli were elab-
orated by crossing transparency and polygraphy. Hence, a 2
(transparent vs. opaque words) ⫻ 2 (monographic vs. polygraphic
words) within-subject ANOVA was conducted for each grade. For
ease of comparison, the results are reported as a function of grade.
Table 3
Reading Mean Correct Latencies in Milliseconds (and Standard Deviation) and Mean Percentage of Errors (and Standard Deviation)
as a Function of Grade, Polygraphy, and Transparency
Latencies
Monographic Polygraphic
Grade Transparent Opaque Transparent Opaque
1 1,910 (436) 2,776 (598) 1,786 (360) 3,332 (649)
2 1,496 (295) 1,875 (435) 1,414 (219) 2,216 (568)
3 1,252 (220) 1,644 (370) 1,227 (204) 1,728 (393)
4 1,063 (165) 1,313 (257) 1,053 (147) 1,319 (239)
The ANOVAs revealed significant main effects of transparency
for each grade, Fs1(1, 34 [1, 33 for Grade 4]) ⫽ 428.72, 181.24,
109.06, and 101.03; ␩s2 ⫽ .93, .84, .76, and .75; 95% CIs [1,094,
1,317; 531, 729; 329, 530; and 244, 333]; Fs2(1, 52) ⫽ 170.06,
55.62, 62.42, and 38.36 for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. As
presented in Table 2, transparent words were read significantly
faster than opaque words in all grades. However, the magnitude of
the differences between transparent and opaque words decreased
as the grades progressed (ds ⫽ 1,182, 589, 445, and 259 ms for
Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively).
The main effect of polygraphy was significant by participants
for children in Grades 1 and 2 only, that is, children in Grades 1
and 2 read monographic words faster than polygraphic words,
Fs1(1, 34) ⫽ 113.41 and 78.11; MSEs ⫽ 1,822.66 and 581.01;
␩s2 ⫽ .76 and .60; and 95% CIs [39, 189; and 51, 144] for Grades
1 and 2, respectively. It makes intuitive sense that spelling incon-
sistency would affect reading at a time when detailed orthographic
representations are being established. The interaction between
transparency and polygraphy was also significant by participants
only, Fs1(1, 34 [1, 33 for Grade 4]) ⫽ 257.09, 88.61, 143.32, and
106.04; ␩s2 ⫽ .88, .73, .81, and .76 for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4,
respectively. As indicated in Table 3, transparency effects appear
to be larger for polygraphic words than for monographic words.
Nonetheless, analyses of simple main effects revealed the presence
of significant transparency effects, in all grades, for both mono-
graphic and polygraphic words (see Table 4).
In a subsequent analysis, we examined whether transparent and
opaque words were sensitive to word frequencies by computing
the correlation between frequency judgments and mean latencies
for each word. It is assumed that more frequent words are more
likely to have been read more frequently and, consequently, more
likely to have better defined orthographic representations. Consis-
tent with this view, more frequent words were related to faster
reading times for transparent words, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.54, as well as for
opaque words, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.56.
Error rate analyses. As shown in Tables 2 and 3, the pattern
of error rates in reading was similar to that of latencies. However,
we were unable to conduct ANOVAs to measure lexicality or
transparency effect on errors because the error rates for transparent
word and nonword reading was very low. In fact, for transparent
words, 82% of children—and for nonwords, more than 70% of
children—read all stimuli correctly. In contrast, only 10% of
children were able to read all opaque words correctly. Nonetheless,
the pattern of error rates presented in Table 2 supports the strong
% Error
Monographic Polygraphic
Transparent Opaque Transparent Opaque
2.48 (4.56) 16.33 (11.03) 0.82 (2.30) 28.77 (15.82)
1.22 (2.73) 13.67 (10.44) 1.01 (2.53) 15.71 (12.82)
0.61 (2.66) 9.59 (8.11) 0.20 (1.20) 15.51 (13.47)
0.00 (0.00) 3.15 (4.71) 0.63 (3.67) 5.46 (5.84)
 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN 7

Table 4
Transparent Versus Opaque One-Way Analysis of Variance Results by Subject (Item), Effect
Size, and 95% Confidence Intervals for Monographic and Polygraphic Words for Each Grade

Monographic Polygraphic

Grade F1(2) ␩2 95% CI F1(2) ␩2 95% CI

1 153.80 (37.80) .82 [724, 1,009] 390.12 (174.60) .92 [1,387, 1,705]
2 106.31 (2.24) .76 [304, 453] 130.41 (52.10) .77 [658, 944]
3 99.60 (19.07) .79 [309, 473] 115.55 (56.50) .77 [406, 596]
4 78.71 (22.96) .70 [192, 307] 77.53 (16.99) .71 [204, 327]

Note. Degrees of freedom for subject analyses are 1 and 34 for Grades 1–3; 1 and 33 for Grade 4; and 1 and
26 for item analyses. The subscript 1 refers to analyses by subject, and the subscript 2 refers to analyses by items.

transparency effects obtained for latency analyses. That is, chil-
dren’s error rates were substantially higher for opaque word read-
ing (M ⫽ 14%) than for transparent word reading (M ⫽ 1%). In
contrast, Persian polygraphy did not influence reading accuracy, as
children read polygraphic words (M ⫽ 8%) almost as accurately as
monographic words (M ⫽ 6%; see Table 3).
Given the higher level of errors on opaque words, it was
possible to examine statistically children’s progress across grades,
and this analysis revealed a significant grade effect, F1(3, 135) ⫽
24.35, MSE ⫽ 79.68, as well as a significant linear trend across
grades. Children read opaque words more accurately with each
passing grade, starting at 77% accuracy in Grade 1 to reach 95%
accuracy in Grade 4.
Spelling Performance
Mean latencies, standard deviations, and error rates for spelling
polygraphic words, monographic words, and nonwords are pre-
sented in Table 5.
Latency analyses. To evaluate children’s spelling speed, we
conducted a 4 (grade) ⫻ 3 (stimuli: polygraphic words, mono-
graphic words, and nonwords) mixed-factor ANOVA. There was a
significant grade effect, with older children spelling faster than
younger children, F1(3, 135) ⫽ 29.71, ␩2 ⫽ .41; F2(3, 91) ⫽
235.19. Trend analyses across grades yielded significant linear and
quadratic differences. The linear trend revealed that children’s
overall spelling speed improved over time, whereas the quadratic
trend was likely due to the fact that there was no difference in
performance between Grades 3 and 4 (Ms ⫽ 2,499, 2,187, 1,976,
and 1,974 ms for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively).
There was also a significant effect of stimuli, F1(2, 135) ⫽
96.47, ␩2 ⫽ .43; F2(2, 91) ⫽ 24.87, with faster spelling speed for
monographic words (M ⫽ 2,024) followed by nonwords (M ⫽
2,099) and polygraphic words (M ⫽ 2,329). Moreover, there was
a significant Grade ⫻ Stimuli interaction, F1(6, 135) ⫽ 4.64, ␩2 ⫽
.11; F2(6, 91) ⫽ 10.69. This expected interaction was further
examined by testing for lexicality effects at each grade. Although
spelling onsets for monographic words were slightly faster than
those for nonwords at each grade, the differences were never
significant (all ps ⬎ .15). Moreover, children never spelled poly-
graphic words faster than nonwords (see Table 5). Contrary to the
reading results, these analyses failed to reveal any lexicality effects
for spelling monographic or polygraphic words.
The next series of analyses tested for the presence of polygraphy
effects. Because these analyses excluded nonwords, the analyses
acknowledged the fact that the real-word stimuli were elaborated
by crossing polygraphy and transparency. Hence, a 2 ⫻ 2 ANOVA
was conducted with polygraphy (monographic vs. polygraphic)
and transparency (transparent vs. opaque words) as within-subject
factors. There was a strong polygraphy effect on children’s spell-
ing at each grade, that is, monographic words were always spelled
significantly faster than polygraphic words, Fs1(1, 34 [1, 33 for
Grade 4]) ⫽ 72.82, 154.88, 108.71, and 277.39; ␩s2 ⫽ .68, .82, .76,
and .89; 95% CIs [314, 628; 218, 346; 161, 274; and 201, 279];
Fs2(1, 52) ⫽ 62.94, 34.05, 28.13, and 28.44 for Grades 1, 2, 3, and
4, respectively. However, the magnitude of the differences be-
tween monographic and polygraphic words tended to decrease as
the grades progressed, albeit not consistently (ds ⫽ 471, 282, 218,
and 241 ms for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively). The main effect

Table 5
Spelling Mean Correct Latencies in Milliseconds (and Standard Deviation) and Mean
Percentage of Errors (and Standard Deviation) for Nonwords, Monographic Words, and
Polygraphic Words as a Function of Grade

Latencies % Error

Grade Nonword Monographic Polygraphic Nonword Monographic Polygraphic

1 2,381 (391) 2,312 (293) 2,783 (511) 4.44 (3.92) 2.11 (3.53) 36.76 (9.16)
2 2,147 (299) 2,066 (246) 2,348 (326) 2.43 (2.50) 2.86 (3.25) 27.33 (11.80)
3 1,915 (268) 1,900 (236) 2,118 (273) 0.93 (1.90) 1.71 (2.60) 23.24 (11.27)
4 1,939 (268) 1,870 (200) 2,111 (231) 1.01 (1.93) 0.39 (1.10) 11.86 (8.05)
8 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL
of transparency on children’s spelling was significant for Grade 1
and Grade 2 only, that is, children in Grades 1 and 2 spelled
transparent words faster than opaque words, F1(1, 34) ⫽ 34.65,
␩2 ⫽ .35, 95% CI [193, 310]; F2(1, 52) ⫽ 23.80; and F1(1, 34) ⫽
7.52, p ⫽ .01, ␩2 ⫽ .16, 95% CI [178, 283]; F2(1, 52) ⫽ 28.69 for
Grades 1 and 2, respectively. The Polygraphy ⫻ Transparency
interaction was not significant at any grade level.
The examination of the correlation coefficients between word
frequency and spelling latencies revealed a different pattern across
word type. Word frequency was associated with spelling poly-
graphic words, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.46, p ⫽ .03, but not with spelling
monographic words, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.04, p ⫽ .67, despite similar
distributions of latencies and frequencies across word type. These
findings support the notion that children must retrieve some or-
thographic information to select the correct letter among an array
of plausible choices when spelling polygraphic words.
Error rate analyses. The pattern of error rates was consistent
with that obtained for latencies. As indicated in Table 5, children’s
error rates were substantially higher for spelling polygraphic
words (M ⫽ 25%) compared with monographic words (M ⫽ 2%).
In fact, 80% of children made no error for monographic words,
whereas only 3% of children spelled polygraphic words entirely
correctly. A one-way ANOVA on polygraphic words yielded a
significant grade effect, F1(3, 135) ⫽ 37.78. Follow-up analyses
revealed a significant linear trend showing that children’s spelling
accuracy improved with schooling. Further, examination of the
polygraphic words in Table 6 revealed that opaque polygraphic
words were particularly difficult for children.
Finally, examination of the types of spelling errors across grades
revealed that almost all of children’s spelling errors were substi-
tution errors. For polygraphic words, the misspelled words were
phonologically correct and sounded like the target words, but
children selected a wrong letter for a polygraphic phoneme that
resulted in a pseudohomophone. For the few spelling errors on
monographic words, children generally substituted a grapheme
that had a similar sound to the target phoneme.
Supplemental Error Analyses
Examination of children’s reading and spelling errors revealed
that although there were words that children could read and spell
correctly or those that they were not able either to read or spell,
there were words that children were able to read but could not spell
and those that they were able to spell but could not read. It is those
two latter types of words that we examined to provide converging
Table 6
Spelling Mean Correct Latencies in Milliseconds (and Standard Deviation) and Mean Percentage of Errors (and Standard Deviation)
as a Function of Grade, Polygraphy, and Transparency
Latencies
Monographic Polygraphic
Grade Transparent Opaque Transparent Opaque
1 2,189 (339) 2,434 (282) 2,618 (468) 3,072 (614)
2 1,943 (235) 2,193 (286) 2,234 (328) 2,516 (396)
3 1,795 (255) 2,009 (254) 1,965 (258) 2,331 (348)
4 1,745 (212) 1,994 (204) 1,948 (202) 2,292 (304)
evidence of the differential difficulty for reading and spelling
posed by the characteristics of Persian. As expected, the words that
children most often read correctly but spelled incorrectly were
polygraphic (80%, 83%, 83% and 82% of errors for Grades 1, 2,
3, and 4, respectively), and the words that children most often
spelled correctly but read incorrectly were opaque–monographic
(80%, 75%, 81%, and 86% of errors for Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4,
respectively). Moreover, the correlations between reading and
spelling transparent–polygraphic words, r(137) ⫽ .07, p ⬎ .05,
and opaque–monographic words, r(137) ⫽ .10, p ⬎ .05, were not
significant. Taken together, these results suggest that the opacity of
words typically affected reading, not spelling, and that the polyg-
raphy of words typically affected spelling, not reading. Further
support comes from the association between reading and spelling
the easiest categories of words as well as the hardest categories of
words. There was a significant correlation between reading and
spelling easy transparent–monographic words, r(137) ⫽ .25, p ⬍
.05, as well as reading and spelling hard opaque–polygraphic
words, r(137) ⫽ .48, p ⬍ .01. These correlational results, however,
should be interpreted with caution given the high accuracy rates
for some words.
Discussion
In the present study, we investigated the developmental change
in Persian children’s reading and spelling across the first four years
of instruction. We found the children became more efficient read-
ers and spellers across grades but that the greatest growth occurred
between Grades 1 and 2. Growth, however, was affected by the
orthographic characteristics of Persian. For reading, lexicalization
was present starting in Grade 2 for words that were transparent, but
lexicalization was not yet present in Grade 4 for opaque words. For
spelling, no lexicality effects were found for either monographic or
polygraphic words in any grade. As expected, there were strong
transparency effects for reading, and there were strong polygraphy
effects for spelling. Although the size of the transparency effects
decreased for reading across grades, polygraphy effects for spell-
ing did not decrease systematically. Most interesting was the
finding that children in Grades 1 and 2 were the most sensitive to
interference of word complexities across literacy tasks. Specifi-
cally, polygraphy affected reading performance, and transparency
affected spelling performance for these children, but these effects
were no longer present by Grade 3. Each of these findings is
discussed in turn.
% Error
Monographic Polygraphic
Transparent Opaque Transparent Opaque
1.71 (3.37) 2.48 (4.30) 17.33 (9.46) 56.19 (14.03)
1.14 (2.55) 4.57 (5.55) 10.28 (9.88) 44.38 (17.93)
0.19 (1.13) 3.24 (3.21) 9.71 (8.76) 36.76 (16.75)
0.20 (1.14) 0.59 (1.92) 5.30 (5.38) 18.43 (12.61)
 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN
The findings in the present study show the gradual progression
toward more efficient literacy skills across Grades 1– 4, with the
greatest period of growth between Grades 1 and 2. Specifically, the
averaged difference in word reading speed across Grades 2, 3, and
4 was 281 ms, but it was 690 ms between Grades 1 and 2.
Similarly, the average difference in spelling speed across Grades 2,
3, and 4 was 108 ms, but it was 341 ms between Grades 1 and 2.
Although Persian is generally viewed as a transparent orthography
(Baluch, 2006), it is interesting that the pattern of greatest growth
is similar to that found in longitudinal research in English (Juel,
1988) as well as French (Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, Bechennec,
& Serniclaes, 2003), Spanish (Defior et al., 2002), and Dutch
(Aarnoutse, Van Leeuwe, Voeten, & Oud, 2001). The key differ-
ence is that results in Persian pertain to latencies, and those for the
above-mentioned languages pertain to accuracy.
In the present study, we found a differential growth pattern for
lexicality effects across word types. First-grade children read
transparent Persian words as fast as transparent nonwords, but
from Grade 2 onward, children read transparent words signifi-
cantly faster than transparent nonwords. Therefore, the availability
of one-to-one correspondences for transparent words helped Per-
sian children to learn to read these words quickly, which, in turn,
facilitated lexicalization. In addition, academic experience also led
to more efficient use of orthographic representations, as the size of
lexicality effects increased with each passing grade. The acquisi-
tion of efficient orthographic representations seemed more diffi-
cult when there was not a one-to-one relation between letters and
sounds, as was the case for opaque words. Children never read
opaque words faster than nonwords. Nonetheless, the differences
between opaque word and nonword reading decreased systemati-
cally across the grades, such that fourth-grade children read
opaque words as fast as nonwords. Most important, the presence of
a lexicality effect for opaque words in young adults (Rahbari &
Sénéchal, 2009) and the absence of one for the fourth-grade
children in the present study suggest that opaque word reading in
Persian reaches lexicalization after Grade 4.
In the present research, children read transparent words faster
and more accurately than words in which the orthographic repre-
sentation excluded a vocalic phoneme (i.e., opaque words). The
three-letter words were matched on number of letters, consonant
onset, frequency, and duration. As such, the present results add,
under more controlled conditions, to the limited body of research
on Persian reading in children (Arab-Moghaddam & Sénéchal,
2001; Baluch & Danaye-Tousi, 2006; Baluch & Shahidi, 1991;
Rahbari et al., 2007) and adults (Baluch & Besner, 1991; Rahbari
& Sénéchal, 2009). The present findings also extend, under more
natural reading conditions, previous research in Arabic (Abu-
Rabia & Taha, 2006) and Hebrew (Ravid & Shlesinger, 2001) that
shows that adult and children readers are slower and more error
prone when reading words with vowels omitted as compared with
reading the same words with diacritic marks for the vowel pho-
neme.
The novelty of the current findings, however, is to show the
developmental progression over the first four years of schooling.
We found that the magnitude of the transparency effect decreased
systematically with reading experience. That is, the differences
between transparent and opaque words observed for younger chil-
dren tended to be smaller in older children’s reading. For instance,
the difference between transparent and opaque words was 1,182
9
ms in Grade 1, and it dropped substantially to 259 ms in Grade 4.
The reported difference in Persian adult readers was 100 ms
(Rahbari & Sénéchal, 2009). These findings are consistent with the
evidence from studies in other languages showing that inconsis-
tencies/irregularities have a larger effect on young children’s as
compared with older children’s reading performance (e.g., Alegria
& Mousty, 1996; Weekes, Castles, & Davies, 2006).
The decrease over time in the advantage of nonwords over
opaque words coupled with the decrease over time in the magni-
tude of the transparency effect suggest that children are gradually
building orthographic representations for reading opaque words.
This interpretation was further supported by a moderately strong
association between opaque-word reading latencies and word fre-
quency, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.56.
In the present research, opaque and transparent words were
matched in the number of letters such that the orthographic struc-
ture for transparent words was CVC, and it was CCC for opaque
words. As a consequence, the opaque words had a coda structure
that was more complex, even though the words were matched on
initial consonant and duration (i.e., naming latencies were con-
trolled across word types). Given that syllabic structure is known
to affect reading acquisition in other languages (e.g., Sprenger-
Charolles & Siegel, 1997), it raises the possibility that the differ-
ence between transparent and opaque words might be due to
differences in coda complexity. Reading performance differences
between opaque and transparent words cannot, however, be sub-
sumed entirely to syllabic complexity because of the well-
established findings that reading the same words with or without
diacritics to mark vowels still produces transparency effects in
children and adult readers (Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006; Ravid &
Shlesinger, 2001). Moreover, adult readers of Persian read opaque
word faster than nonwords with a CVC structure, yet they read
opaque words slower than transparent words (Rahbari & Sénéchal,
2009). The issue of coda complexity, nonetheless, should be in-
vestigated further in future research.
The spelling results show similarities and differences with those
for reading. Similar to the reading results, children in higher grades
spelled both words and nonwords faster and more accurately than
did children in lower grades. These results are consistent with the
findings from many studies showing a significant effect of grade
levels in children’s spelling (e.g., Laxon, Coltheart, & Keating,
1988; Weekes et al., 2006). Contrary to the reading results, how-
ever, there was no lexicality effect either for monographic or for
polygraphic words. In particular, the lack of a systematic incre-
ment in the difference between word and nonword spelling across
grades suggests that children used the same phonological pro-
cesses to spell both words and nonwords in all grades. The results
are consistent with studies showing that phonological processing
plays an important role in spelling consistent orthographic systems
(Porpodas, 2001; Wimmer & Hummer, 1990). However, the pat-
tern of findings was more complex. The examination of the cor-
relation coefficients between word frequency and word type
showed a different pattern across word types. The finding that
spelling monographic words was not sensitive to word frequencies,
r(26) ⫽ ⫺.04, is consistent with the interpretation that phonolog-
ical processing is involved in spelling. However, the significant
correlation between polygraphic word spelling and word fre-
quency, r(26) ⫽ ⫺.46, suggests that phonological processing alone
does not produce accurate spellings of words with inconsistent
10 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL
phoneme– grapheme correspondences. To spell inconsistent graph-
emes correctly, children use other sources of information, such as
their orthographic knowledge acquired from exposure to words.
Similar results were obtained for young adult spellers (Rahbari &
Sénéchal, 2009). This is also supported by evidence from Rahbari
et al. (2007), who reported that the unique contribution of ortho-
graphic skills was almost twice as high when spelling polygraphic
(7%) than monographic (3%) words. Moreover, the unique con-
tribution of phonological skills was three times smaller when
spelling polygraphic words (8%) as compared with monographic
words (24%).
The significant polygraphy effect obtained is in accord with
evidence from cross-orthographic as well as within-orthographic
studies showing that spelling consistent words/orthographies is
easier than spelling inconsistent words/orthographies (e.g., Cara-
volas & Bruck, 1993; Juul, 2005; Wimmer & Landerl, 1997).
However, the magnitude of the polygraphy effect for latencies did
not decrease dramatically across Grades 2, 3, and 4 (ds ⫽ 282,
218, and 241 ms, respectively). Findings in other orthographies
demonstrate that spelling consistency effects based on accuracy do
decrease with academic experience in French-speaking (Alegria &
Mousty, 1996) or English-speaking (e.g., Cassar & Treiman, 1997;
Laxon et al., 1988; Weekes et al., 2006) children. The current
findings raise the interesting possibility of a relatively stable effect
on latencies that is not as sensitive to spelling experience. The
possibility of a stable effect is also supported by a comparison with
adult spellers. Rahbari and Sénéchal (2009) reported a 154-ms
advantage for monographic words over polygraphic words. In the
present research, however, children read and spelled very short
words. It is also possible that when the length of a word is short,
such as the one-syllable words in the present study, a speller may
be able to quickly select appropriate graphemes for the phonemes
kept in working memory. With longer words, however, it may be
more efficient to retrieve orthographic representations. These in-
teresting possibilities could be examined further in future research.
The reading and spelling results obtained in the present research
contribute in three ways to our understanding of the development
of accurate and well-defined orthographic representations. First,
the use of latencies revealed that reading and spelling fluency was
still progressing in Grades 3 and 4. In fact, fourth-grade students
still had not reached adult reading and spelling speed for these
familiar three-letter words. This raises the interesting theoretical
question of determining when literacy reaches asymptotic levels.
Actual models of word reading acquisition based on reading ac-
curacy seldom consider word reading growth beyond the early
elementary school years, but the present findings suggest the need
to document the development of word reading and spelling beyond
Grade 4.
The second contribution concerns the difficulty in building
well-defined orthographic representations that are redundant pho-
nologically when there are mismatches between the phonology and
orthography of a language. In the present research, the mismatch
for reading concerned vocalic phonemes that were not represented
by a grapheme (i.e., opaque words) and the mismatch for spelling
concerned consonantal phonemes that could be represented by
more than one grapheme (i.e., polygraphic words). Although quite
different, these mismatches slowed the reading and spelling pro-
cess. That is, there were reliable transparency effects for reading as
well as stable consistency effects for spelling at each grade, sug-
gesting the involvement of phonological processing. At the same
time, there was a significant correlation coefficient between word
frequency and reading opaque words as well as between word
frequency and spelling polygraphic words, suggesting the involve-
ment of orthographic processing for these words. If one accepts
that orthographic processes are also involved in opaque-word
reading and polygraphic-word spelling, then one has to explain
why opaque words are more difficult to read and why polygraphic
words are more difficult to spell than words without mismatches
between phonology and orthography. Rahbari and Sénéchal (2009)
proposed that these differences might be related to a selection
mechanism for opaque word reading in Persian. Recall that Persian
opaque words appear as a sequence of consonant letters, and,
consequently, a Persian reader has to select a correct vowel among
three plausible vowels. This selection mechanism might slow
down the reading of opaque words. Rahbari and Sénéchal found
some support for this interpretation in that Persian adults read
opaque words faster than nonwords (i.e., a lexicality effect), but
opaque words were still read significantly slower than transparent
words. The present findings suggest that a similar selection mech-
anism might be at play for spelling. That is, when spelling poly-
graphic words, the speller has to choose a letter among two or
more plausible alternatives for the same phoneme, and this selec-
tion might take time as compared with when a one-to-one corre-
spondence exists between sounds and letters.
The third theoretical contribution concerns the vulnerability of
the developing orthographic representations during acquisition.
The present findings clearly show that both a mismatch between
letter–sound correspondences as well as a mismatch between
sound–letter correspondences affected both reading and spelling
during the initial phases of acquisition. That is, children in Grades
1 and 2 had more difficulty reading and spelling words that
contained sound-to-letter mismatches as well as those that con-
tained letter-to-sound mismatches. The findings for Grade 2 are
particularly interesting because these children had high accuracy
rates and had reached lexicalization for reading transparent words
(i.e., reading transparent words faster than nonwords). These find-
ings for Grade 2 suggest that although children might seem to have
well-defined orthographic representations in place, the influence of
spelling characteristics on reading and vice versa suggests that
their orthographic representations are still vulnerable to interfer-
ence. This cross-over effect was no longer present by Grade 3.
There are limitations in the present study that are noteworthy.
First, in the present research, we did not examine how semantic
processes interact with phonological and orthographic processes.
One can certainly imagine the importance of semantic processes in
reading opaque words that are homographic (as in the example of
bd that can represent bid, bed, bud). The present findings are
therefore limited to opaque words that have a single pronunciation
and a single orthographic representation. Second, we did not
examine a potentially important feature of the Persian orthographic
system. Persian, unlike English, is written with a mixture of
cursive and disjointed letters, that is, some of the words in Persian
have a mandatory spelling in which all or some of the letters have
to be written in a joined fashion, whereas other words or letter
combinations have to be written in a disjointed fashion. This
characteristic of Persian writing, which is independent of polyg-
raphy effects, may also affect spelling latencies, in particular if one
measures the time to spell entire words, and warrants further
 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN
examination. In the present study, however, spelling latencies were
based on onsets, not whole words. Third, a more sensitive assess-
ment of latencies might reveal small, but significant, differences
between spelling latencies for monographic words and nonwords.
In conclusion, the current findings that experience and word
characteristics influence children’s reading and spelling develop-
ment qualify the view that literacy skills are acquired as a sequence
of stages (Frith, 1985; Gough & Juel, 1991). In fact, the current
pattern of findings for reading and spelling are in accord with an
alternative view of development whereby gradual quantitative
changes in proficiency occur as children become increasingly
sensitive to the internal structure of written words as well as to the
correspondences between letters or groups of letters in words and
their pronunciation (Perfetti, 1992; Rayner et al., 2001; Share,
1999). Moreover, the obtained differential pattern of results for
reading and spelling highlights the importance of studying their
development concurrently (Hanley & Kay, 1992; Weekes & Colt-
heart, 1996). Finally, and most interesting from a developmental
perspective, is 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 in
Grades 3 and 4. Specifically, in Grades 3 and 4, transparency
effects were limited to reading, and polygraphy effects were lim-
ited to spelling. This pattern highlights the vulnerability of chil-
dren’s representations and processes during the early phases of
acquisition as well as the rapidity with which representations (and
processes) may become specialized as a function of the literacy
task at hand.
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 READING AND SPELLING IN PERSIAN 13

Appendix A

List of Real Words (58) Used to Test Persian Children’s Reading and Spelling With Frequencies
and Duration (in Milliseconds) in Parentheses

Transparent Opaque
Type of words Persian spelling Pronunciation Meaning Persian spelling Pronunciation Meaning

(2.20,603) dig pot (4.46,692) kshf/kashf discovery

(3.15,829) rig gravel (3.85,658) grg/gorg wolf
(3.35,795) pich screw (2.63,759) knj/kong corner
(3.35,707) kham raw (3.01,739) shrm/sharm shame
(3.01,624) bim fear (3.20,679) plk/pelk eyelid
(5.85,713) pak clean (4.02,642) pshm/pashm wool
(4.45,663) pir old (4.10,768) mrg/marg death
Non-polygraphic (3.36,663) mikh nail (3.95,745) khrj/kharj expense
(3.65,645) kakh palace (3.15,827) kshk/kashk dried whey
(4.55,621) khun blood (3.75,666) pkhsh/pakhsh broadcast
(2.45,590) gij confused (3.82,686) gnj/ganj treasure
(2.80,607) gur grave (2.50,661) kbk/kabk partridge
(3.62,742) kuch migration (3.23,789) chrb/charb oily
(3.75,787) shur salty (4.75,771) jshn/jashn festival

(3.55,665) sim wire (3.25,710) ghrg/gharg sink

(2.82,616) gif funnel (3.45,884) sgf/sagf ceiling
(3.75,718) naz cute (2.93,570) gtb/gotb pole
(4.73,678) raz secret (2.01,732) sbt/sabt registration
(3.01,715) zag crow (2.62,811) shl/sahl easy
(3.45,883) saf smooth (4.25,802) slh/solh peace
(3.95,869) sud benefit (3.15,780) zhn/zehn mind
polygraphic (3.75,803) sut whistle (3.92,786) shrt/shart condition
(3.80,710) chag fat (3.01,766) zbt/zabt record
(5.64,646) bag garden (3.62,715) chtr/chatr umbrella
(2.60,779) tag crown (3.15,710) rbt/rabt connection
(3.54,697) dag hot (2.95,585) ngs/nags deficiency
(3.00,610) gaz gas (3.50,637) grz/garz debt
(2.45,810) tig thorn (3.92,700) gsd/gasd purpose

(Appendices continue)
14 RAHBARI AND SÉNÉCHAL

Appendix B

List of Nonwords (38) Used to Test Phonological Processing

Non-words Non-words

Persian spelling Pronunciation Persian spelling Pronunciation

rib bukh

mig Makh

luj shar

lab fid

razh nal

rab dizh

khim mazh

paj jab

chud shil

dak cham

zhir vash

juj lud

jad rim

nukh daf

dil zhid

lad lakh

khazh rif

rak zhar

dikh zhuk

Received May 21, 2009

Revision received May 19, 2010
Accepted May 25, 2010 䡲

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