Word Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children

Abstract

Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods:In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio-recorded during free play with an examiner and during description of pictures.Results: Object-Verb (OV) and subject-verb (SV) sentence structures were the most commonly used in two-component simple sentences. SOV was the most common three-component structures used by Persian-speaking children.Discussion: Despite the fact that the spoken-Persian language has no strict word order, Persianspeaking children tend to use other logically possible orders of subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) lesser than the SOV structure.

Effect of grammar intervention on vocabulary skills in children with a cochlear implant: A single-subject study

“…Specifications of the research-made grammar treatment program: Based on the normal development of language in two- to five-year-old children, the grammatical components used by them were extracted. Since the training of grammatical components was based on a sentence for each of the grammatical components, several sentences were constructed that had the following characteristics: using basic vocabulary in them ( 26 ); using patterns of word order in Persian children’s sentences ( 27 ); and using different grammatical roles of grammatical components (subject, object) in constructing sentences. The sentences were arranged from simple to complex in terms of length and grammatical complexity.…”

Adaptation and validation of the word complexity measure for Persian-speaking toddlers

“…By the age of 3, children can correctly produce some clusters according to the 75% criterion, with the number and variety increasing with age. Nevertheless, cluster reduction is common in Persian until the age of 4 (Zarifian & Fotuhi, 2020), and there are reports of it persisting until 6 years old (Jalilevand et al, 2011). Consequently, the production of consonant clusters is considered a complexity parameter in the WCM-P, with each cluster in a word assigned one point.…”

“…Persian has a single rhotic phoneme with allophonic variation depending on word position (Rafat, 2010). While the /r/ consonant is common in Persian, it is considered one of the most complex and later developing sounds (Jalilevand et al, 2011). Persian-speaking children often glide or omit liquid consonants, and the /r/ sound typically emerges after 19 months, being the most difficult to pronounce up to 42 months.…”

“…Persian-speaking children often glide or omit liquid consonants, and the /r/ sound typically emerges after 19 months, being the most difficult to pronounce up to 42 months. However, it is important to note that syllabic liquids and rhotic vowels are not represented in the Persian phoneme inventory (Jalilevand et al, 2011). Therefore, these parameters have been removed from the WCM since they are not applicable to Persian.…”

Using Computerized Language Analysis to Evaluate Grammatical Skills

“…Although to a lesser extent than IPSyn, DSS has been used by researchers to assess children representing a broad range of ages, languages, and disorders (Buhr & Zebrowski, 2009;Deevy & Leonard, 2018;Eisenberg et al, 2018;Finestack & Abbeduto, 2010;Jalilevand et al, 2016;Miyata et al, 2013;Rice et al, 2006). For example, Rice et al (2006) compared the performance of 39 children with SLI (M age = 4.85 years), 40 children with typical development of similar MLU (M age = 2.96 years), and 45 children with typical development of similar age (M age = 4.99 years) based on MLU, IPSyn, and DSS measures.…”