Alphabetic Hand: A Multisensory Intervention for Dyslexic Persian-Speaking Children

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student in Cognitive Psychology, Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

10.22054/jpe.2026.93961.2952
Abstract
This letter to the editor introduces a proposed intervention protocol. Developmental dyslexia is a prevalent learning disorder, and recent interventions in Iran have primarily focused on cognitive rehabilitation and phonics-based methods. As an abjad script, Persian presents unique visuo-orthographic challenges—such as high visual similarity among letters, positional allography, and the typical omission of short vowels—that are rarely targeted by conventional interventions. The purpose of this letter was to introduce the "Alphabetic Hand," a culturally adapted, embodied intervention designed to enhance visual-auditory discrimination in Persian-speaking children with dyslexia. The design of this method was guided by two principles, maximum differentiation and motor ease, and involved mapping each Persian phoneme onto a specific finger segment. Published evidence from rigorous randomized controlled trials indicated that congruent hand movements significantly improved conditional letter-sound knowledge, while neuroimaging evidence revealed that such motor-phoneme mapping could strengthen functional connectivity between sensorimotor and visual networks, a key deficit in dyslexia. The method is scalable, low-cost, and requires no technology. The main conclusion was that the Alphabetic Hand method should be regarded as a proposed protocol, and its effectiveness requires confirmation in future clinical trials.

Keywords



Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 12 September 2026