First steps in acquiring Persian morphology

Very few studies have looked at Persian morphology in children and none have so far dealt with the earliest production of inflectional morphemes, which occur as suffixes on nouns and both prefixes and suffixes on verbs. This study is based on four children whose data were recorded longitudinally in Iran on a biweekly basis, beginning when they were reportedly still in the single-word period. We address the following questions: What are the first steps of morphological development in Persian? Which morphemes do children pick up at the very start of morphology? And what other aspects of linguistic development relate to the early morphological development? Do children produce inflected forms before the onset of two- word stage or after? For this purpose, we analyse extent of use of all the inflectional morphemes that occur in one or more of the four children’s first forms. We identify and quantify these morphemes along with their first point of appearance and contrastive use. We test the relationship between each of three factors that may relate to morphological development: (1) phonological development (2) lexical development (3) syntactic development. The results of this study show that a correlation between early morphological development and syntactic development exist while such correlation was not seen between morphological development and phonological and between morphological development and lexical development. The results of this study are consistent with the constructivist model of Pre- /Proto-morphology, in which it is believed that children start with rote-learnt inflected forms in the pre-morphology period and start using these inflectional morphemes contrastively which results in their productive use in the proto-morphology period.