The Relation between Phonological Awareness and Reading in Persian children with autism

Since there is no special reading and writing book for the Persian children with autism and also their cognitive and linguistic abilities are different, the investigation of the effective factors on their reading skill is an important step for evaluating and modifying their using pedagogical books. In the other hand, Persian language has a different orthography and grapheme–phoneme correspondence from other languages (English, Italian...), so the effect of phonological awareness in it΄s reading is also different. Therefore, it’s necessary to identify the correlation between phonological awareness and reading in Persian children with autism. In this research, 26 children with autism and 30 normal Persian children living in Tehran were participated. Two tests (phonological awareness and reading) were performed and the results were analyzed by statistical tests. Results showed that in the group with autism, there is a meaningful correlation between word reading and phoneme combination and same first Phoneme recognition, and between non word reading and alliteration, phoneme segmentation, first and final phoneme deletion. In control group, there is a significant correlation between word reading (and non-word reading) and the onset and rhyme awareness, phonemic awareness, alliteration, same first phonemes, first phoneme and middle phoneme deletion. Also, there is a significant difference between the children with autism and control group in all subtests except for the syllable segmentation (0.075) and phoneme combination (0.163). Therefore, the degree of skill and correlation in the children with autism is different from the normal children and this should be noticed seriously in teaching reading.