The relationship between reading skills and syntactic and lexical abilities in dyslexic and normal Persian-speaking children

Reading is one of the most valuable skills of the human being. This complex behavior is composed of several distinct and separable subskills. Furthermore, different theories of reading methods have been proposed and each language has a different paradigm depending on its writing system. Apparently, the most common method among these is the one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme. However, this method has some drawbacks. According to Ahri and Snowling (2004), if the sequential decoding strategy is slow and inefficient it overloads the memory leading to inaccurate pronunciation and lack of associative meaning. As a result of repeated exposure to printed words, children's knowledge of spelling patterns is expanded to facilitate its retrieval of meaning. To clarify the role of decoding in reading and reading disability, a simple model of reading is proposed. According to the Simple View (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), reading ability can result from the combination of decoding and comprehension. In this view, reading comprehension is conceptualized as the product of two interrelated -but relatively independent- cognitive processes, that are, decoding (or word recognition) and listening comprehension (or language comprehension). Both of them are necessary cognitive components, and neither alone is sufficient for successful reading comprehension. In addition to word recognition problems, many reading-disabled individuals were found to have impaired reading comprehension. Although the central role of phonological deficits in word recognition difficulties has been widely demonstrated, the role of language abilities in the reading profile of dyslexic individuals has not been fully captured. Dyslexia, also known as specific reading disability, has been defined as one of several distinct learning disabilities that reading performance is markedly below what is expected in normally achieving readers (Siegel, 1992). In some studies, the existence of lexical problems in dyslexic children has been investigated. It has been shown that the level of lexical and semantic ability of children affects their reading comprehension. For example, some have explained that the breadth and depth of children's lexical knowledge affect their ability to recognize words. Additionally, there is evidence that has consistently established a strong association between language competence and reading abilities. In particular, oral vocabulary (measured with an oral receptive/expressive me