Phonological development in Persian-speaking children: A cross-sectional study

Abstract

Purpose

The Persian language is a member of the Western Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family within the Indo-European language family. Here, we aimed to study phonological development in Persian-speaking children.

Method

The speech samples were collected from 387 children, aged 3–6 years old, using two picture-naming tasks: Persian Articulation and Phonology tests, which were used to study phonetic and phonemic inventories, phoneme accuracy, and the age of error patterns suppression.

Result

Vowels are acquired at three or earlier. Acquisition of all consonants in the initial position precedes that of the final position. Older children had higher values in phoneme accuracy compared with those of the younger children. Although no significant effects of gender on phonological development were found, girls had higher accuracy scores compared with boys. Final devoicing and cluster reduction were the last error patterns which were suppressed by 6.0.

Conclusion

The results showed that the accuracy of children’s productions grew with age and the number of error patterns decreased. It seems that there are some similarities between phonological developments in different languages; however, it is still important to study language specific tendencies to be used in clinical settings and speech sound development research.

Keywords:

• Persian
• phonological development
• error patterns
• consonant acquisition

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to the children and their families for their patience and their participation in this study. The authors would like to sincerely thank linguists Dr. Yahya Modarrersi, Dr. Mohammadreza Razavi, Dr. Golnaz Modarresi Ghavami, Dr. Mehdi Dastjerdi Kazemi, Dr. Robab Teymouri, and statistician Dr. Gholamreza Ghaed Amini for their valuable support.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1758209.