Persian Phonological Awareness Tests: A Comparative Analysis

Objectives: Phonological awareness is an extensive skill for detecting, manipulating, or analyzing the components of oral language, apart from their referents. The phonological awareness consists of different levels from the simplest to the most difficult level. We considered two Persian phonological awareness tests (visual and auditory) with different subtests. This research aimed to investigate the relationship between the total score, subtests scores, and their differences.  Methods: This cross-sectional study included 40 normal children of kindergartens in Tehran, Iran. Based on experimental research designs and cluster sampling method, the samples were selected from four preschool centers, in Tehran. We implemented the auditory and visual phonological awareness tests. The obtained data were analyzed by Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, the Independent t test and the Paired t test in SPSS. Results: In spite of significant differences in the total scores (P<0.05) and the scores of some tasks such as rhyme recognition (P<0.05) and final phoneme recognition (P<0.05), there was a positive correlation between the total scores (r=0.466) and the syllable segmentation tasks (r=0.339). Discussion: Comparing the results of the two tests showed that variations in the response format and task demand can change complexity of the tasks, which could lead to different scores.