Persian speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses

Abstract

The current study examined the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Persian is a relatively unique data point in crosslinguistic research in acquisition because it is a head-final language with post-nominal RCs. Children (N = 51) aged 2 to 7 years completed a picture-selection task that tested their comprehension of subject-, object-, and genitive-RCs. The results showed that the children experienced greater difficulty processing object and genitive RCs when compared to subject RCs, suggesting that the children have particular difficulty processing sentences with non-canonical word order. The results are discussed with reference to a number of theoretical accounts proposed to account for sentence difficulty

Resumptive elements aid comprehension of object relative clauses: evidence from Persian

“…Processing theories that define complexity as the linear distance between verbs and their arguments predict no asymmetry in Persian, since gapped subject and object RCs have the same NNV word order (Gibson, 1998 ;O'Grady, 2011). Previous work on Persian reported a subject advantage in acquisition (Rahmany et al, 2011) ; however, this previous study did not present the test sentences with a supportive discourse context, which significantly affects children's performance (see Corrêa, 1995). In the current study we presented sentences to children in a felicitous discourse context ; we therefore predicted no subject advantage.…”

“…Persian is a null-subject head-final language with Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order (Karimi, 2005). Persian RCs are post-nominal, only allow gaps in subject RCs (3), but allow either a gap, resumptive pronoun, or object clitic in object RCs, as shown in (4)-(6) (for more general information about Persian RCs see Rahmany, Marefat & Kidd, 2011 Persian RCs are introduced by a relative marker (RM) -i attached to the head noun, as in (3). Persian does not have relative pronouns : the RC is always introduced by the relative complementizer ke.…”

Generation and Content Validation of a Persian Syntax Comprehension Test

“…2. Structural simplicity/complexity: In addition to simple structures, we considered complex structures presumably comprehended later (Rahmany , Marefat, & Kidd, 2011, 2013. 3.…”

“…It is worth noting here that most developmental studies in Persian have been conducted on production, and litt le research is available on comprehension of syntax by children (Rahmany e t al., 2011(Rahmany e t al., , 2013. 3 -Empirical evidence for the target groups of this test was collected and their tasks were reviewed (Chapman & Kohn, 1978;Rahmany et al, 2011Rahmany et al, , 2013van der Lely & Harris, 1990). 4 -Th e clinical experience of the research team was considered.…”

“…Both linguists and speech experts were interviewed in order to consider theoretical views and clinical issues. 7 -Tasks in Persian were based on previous studies (Rahmany et al, 2011(Rahmany et al, , 2013. Th e Persian version of the bilingual aphasia test (Paradis, P aribakht, & Nilipour, 1987), the English version of the Test of Language Development-Primary: 3rd Edition (TOLD-P: 3) (Newcomer & Hammill, 1997), and the Test for Reception of Grammar-Version 2 (TROG-2) (Bishop,200 3) were also reviewed to extract the structures.…”