The impact of words’ regularity on recognizing the homophonic words: Evidence from Gilak-Fars children

Vocabulary recognition and processing have always been a topic of interest to many psycholinguists. People can perform differently during this process under the influence of different factors. Regularity is one of these influential factors that, in the present study, is investigated from the perspective of Goswami and Bryant (2016) in recognizing Persian homophonic words in Gilak-Fars children. Research data were collected through a researcher-made “reading test” from fifty students in schools of Rasht and Lahijan. After analyzing them, it was observed that the words’ regularity significantly caused different performances in children’s recognition of homophonic words, and they performed weaker in reading irregular homophones than in regular ones. The reason for this different performance can be due to Persian’s orthographic features, which causes their lack of ability to apply the correct sound to some letters of the words.