Phonological processing skills in 6 year old blind and sighted Persian speakers

Phonological processing skills include the abilities to restore، retrieve and use memorized phonological codes. The purpose of this research is to compare and evaluate phonological processing skills in 6-7 year old blind and sighted Persian speakers in Tehran، Iran. This research is an analysis-comparison study. The subjects were 24 blind and 24 sighted children. The evaluation test of reading and writing disorders in primary school students، linguistic and cognitive abilities test، and the naming subtest of the aphasia evaluation test were used as research tools. Sighted children were found to perform better on phoneme recognition of nonwords and flower naming subtests; and the difference was significant (p<0. 001). Blind children performed better in words and sentence memory; the difference was significant (p<0. 001). There were no significant differences in other subtests. Blind children''s better performance in memory tasks is due to the fact that they have powerful auditory memory.