The acquisition of Persian : grammatically-based measures for assessing normal and abnormal Persian language development.

This study presents a longitudinal analysis of three monolingual
Iranian children's language development between ages 1;8-2;6, 2;2-3;2
and 2;4-3;4. The overall aims are to identify and establish the structural
patterns in the acquisition of Persian, a pro-drop, inflectional and mostly
verb final language. Structural patterns particular to Persian are
identified in contrast to English and data drawn from the children's
language progress are discussed in the light of recent theories of
language acquisition. In addition, the study provides a comprehensive
and systematic description of children's syntactic development in such a
way as to be useful for clinical data analysis by Iranian speech and
language therapists and includes some cross-linguistic comparisons
with other research on language acquisition. The applicability of MLU
(Mean Length of Utterance) measures to Persian is investigated and it is
found that MLU measured in morphemes is most appropriate for
evaluating the Iranian children's early language development up to
value 4. In order to give a more detailed analysis of the children's
language acquisition, the LARSP (Language Assessment Remediation
and Screening Procedure) framework (Crystal, Fletcher and Garman,
1989) is adapted to Persian. Analysing Persian data with LARSP
categories shows that there are many features common to both
languages. Particular categories are identified. A PLARSP (Persian
LARSP) profile is established based on the hypothesis that structures can
be assigned to stages according to their number of elements at clause
and phrase levels. The profile provides a framework for the analysis of
language development in Persian and is employed in chapters 6 and 7 to
set out the developmental picture of the children's language at
approximately equal MLU values in the early stages, and age in the later
stages. Close examination of the data points to the use of formulas by
the children at early stages. Apart from the formulas, although the
children show different strategies of language acquisition, the resulting
distribution of categories is found to fit the data well, presenting an
orderly progress down the chart according to MLU and age.