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

The concurrent development of reading and spelling in English and Persian w ere examined in a sample of bilingual children. The objective was to compar e 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 represent ing more than one phoneme) and polygraphy (i.e., a phoneme represented by m ore 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. F ifty-five Iranian children in grades 2 and 3, who had lived in English-spea king Canada for an average of 4 years, were tested on word reading and spel ling in English and Persian. We found that the predictors of reading perfor mance were similar across languages: Phonological and orthographic processi ng skills each predicted unique variance in word reading in English and in Persian once we had controlled for grade level, vocabulary, and reading exp erience. As expected, the predictors of spelling performance differed acros s 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 t he Persian orthography encourages children to adopt different strategies wh en reading and spelling words. Spelling Persian words might be particularly conducive to using an analytic strategy which, in turn, promotes the devel opment of and reliance on orthographic skills.