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Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.

The present study aims to investigate syntactic deficits in 13 Iranian deaf students aged between 17 and 21 years. Four tests in the form of sentence-recognition and sentence-completion were administered to examine their knowledge of verb inflection, derivational morphology, word order, and prepositions. A between-category analysis of errors indicated a significant dissociation between categories, most notably between verb inflection and derivational morphology and between word order as the category with fewest errors and the three others. On theoretical grounds, the fact that subjects have not acquired much syntax even after years of learning seemed to strengthen the significance of acquiring syntax and morphology in the early years.

The present study aims to explore the semantic knowledge of a group of Iranian deaf individuals who, due mainly to auditory deprivation did not acquire language normally in early years of their life. The participants were ten deaf and a matched number of hearing individuals as control group. A test of five tasks was administrated to assess their knowledge of vocabulary, collocation, semantic categorizations, semantic features, and proverbs. Although the results indicated a significant difference between the deaf and the hearing group, a between- group comparison of each task revealed no significant difference between the deaf and hearing participants in the number of errors in vocabulary, collocations, semantic categorization, and semantic features. The only task in which deaf participants did significantly worse than the control group was that of proverbs. Therefore, it could be argued that, language deprivation in early childhood does not have the same effect on different components of our linguistic knowledge and that the acquisition of semantics may well continue beyond puberty.

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