Characteristics of acquired dyslexia in Persian; the effect of orthographic depth

Abstract

Persian language uses a modified version of Arabic for its writing system, which is characterized by a degree of consistency between Orthography-Phonology (OP) mappings making many words transparent. However, omission of vowels in the script used by skilled readers makes the OP mapping of many words unpredictable or opaque. In this study 21 Persian speakers with aphasia were asked to read aloud the printed names of 200 objects. For the measure of sublexical reading, patients were asked to read aloud 30 non-word stimuli. Mixed-effects logistic regression revealed that word frequency, age of acquisition and imageability predict success in word reading. Furthermore, opaque words were read less accurately than transparent words. The results reveal different patterns of acquired dyslexia in some cases that closely resemble phonological, deep, and surface dyslexia in other scripts, which will be reported in more details.