Objective: The objective of this descriptive and cross-sectional study was to classify and to determine the sort of the students spelling errors, and to study the Persian forms orthographic processing on the basis of linguistic and non-linguistic information in children. Method: The sample was 85 students. The Garman’s (1996) classification was used. This classification suggests that while spelling, children use their memory as well as their linguistic knowledge that might be orthographic, morphological, syntactic or semantic. An orthographic test comprising 246 “goal lexemes and phrases” and 20 dictations from the beginning, the middle and the end of the academic year was the instrument o f the research. Results: the findings manifested that the most spelling error was for the letter level, and the least related to symbol level (e.g., gemination). Regarding the kind of errors, substitutions had the greatest percent. Besides, displacement, repetition and mixed forms had the least percent and were mostly nonlinguistic, and one can assume them as slips of the pen, like speech slips. At the language levels, the most percent of errors was for “lexeme” and the least was for the “syllable”. Conclusion: Most dictation errors were linguistic and originated from the Persian writing system. Furthermore, the findings stress that children enjoy both linguistic information and the visual memory. Processing the orthographic forms which are produced by using linguistic information is easier for them than processing the forms produced by using nonlinguistic (visual) information.

Objective: This study discusses the models of reading with regard to the role of phonological and syntactic processing in the cognitive process of reading. Research literature indicates that syntactic and especially phonological processing  are  identified as critical factors for the explanation of many reading problems such as dyslexia. The main concern of this paper is to determine how critical these two components are with regard to reading problems and to decide which of them is more determinant in the explanation of reading problems. The other question is how the role of these two components is shown in the models of reading. Method: There are 2 main hypotheses explaining the role of phonological and syntactic awareness, accounting for the problems of reading. The 2 hypotheses are “processing limitation hypothesis” and “structural lag hypothesis”. The hypotheses are explained and the models of reading are discussed and analyzed with regard to them. The models which are investigated in this paper include word recognition models and the models of reading process in general.  From among the word recognition models, dual-route models are chosen to be studied since, they are considered as the most crucial ones. The models of reading process also include bottom-up and top-down models, interactive-compensatory model, connectionist models, balanced model of reading, verbal efficiency and phonological capacity models. Results and Conclusion: Finally it is indicated that there is not a unitary model in which the role of both phonological and syntactic awareness is clearly defined. Depending on the practical objects of the models, they might focus either on phonological level of processing (e.g., Phonological Capacity Model) or syntactic level of processing (e.g., Balanced Model of Reading).