Relationship between phonemic awareness and naming speed in second and third grade primary school students

Introduction: Reviewing the previous studies on the relationship between phonological awareness and naming speed are controversial. One of the reasons for this contradiction is the language of the studies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and naming speed in the Farsi speaking students. Materials and Methods: In  this  cross-sectional  study, students  in  second  grade and third  grade (each, n=15) of  public  elementary  schools  in  Tehran  city  (Iran) were  involved. The two groups were given rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness tests. Data analysis for two groups was performed and the correlation between task scores in two groups was measured. Results: The performance of two groups was significantly different in sub-tests of naming and initial phoneme deletion, medial phoneme deletion (P=0.001) and naming and final phoneme deletion (P=0.002). There was no significant difference between two groups in sub-tests of words recognition with the same final phoneme and phoneme segmentation. The time for naming letters (P=0.001) and time for naming numbers (P=0.019) were markedly short in the third grade students. There was no significant correlation between rapid naming of letters, numbers, objects and colors with phonological awareness variables in the second and third grade students except that in the third grade students a significant correlation between rapid naming of letters and words recognition with the same final phoneme was observed (P< 0.05). Conclusion: The lack of a significant correlation between phonological awareness and naming speed can be indicated that naming speed is independent of phonological awareness in Farsi