A study of orthographic depth effect on Persian spelling errors in Azari speaking students

The present study attempts to investigate the effect of orthographic depth on the occurrence of Persian spelling errors of Azari speaking students. To this end، the mentioned factor was calculated by phoneticity measure according to Spencer (1999). The data were collected from 125 papers of final Persian dictation exams. They belonged to students from four junior high schools at the city of Zanjan. After collecting these papers، the erroneous words were classified in a list and examined quantitatively and qualitatively. These errors consist of 20 erroneous words which were used in statistical study of measuring orthographic depth by phoneticity measure.. The research hypothesis، developed based on Spencer (1999)، acknowledged the existence of correlation between orthographic depth factor (phoneticity) and spelling errors. The results showed that orthographic depth had no effect on the spelling skill of the subjects. In other words، the research hypothesis was rejected.