A Comparative Study of the Comprehension and Production of Passive Verbs in Persian Monolingual Children with Turkish-Persian Bilingual Children

Authors
N. Ramezani 1
A. abbasi 2
1 MA in linguistics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran
2 Assistant Professor- Linguistics Department-Alzahra University- Tehran- Iran.
Abstract
The present research is a comparative study of the comprehension and production of passive verbs in Persian monolingual children with Turkish-Persian bilingual children. Given the fact that the usage of passive structures in Persian is more often in writing than in speaking and also having in mind that Turkish passive structures are completely different from the ones in Persian, we want to see if Turkish-Persian bilingual children who have grown up with their native language are able to comprehend and produce Persian passive structures.

Many researchers working abroad have tested the production and comprehension of passive sentences in children using pictures, puppet shows and films. In Iran, although some researches have been done on passive structures and bilingualism, the production and comprehension of passive sentences by bilingual and monolingual children has not been compared yet. Due to the large number of bilingual people in Iran and the importance of bilingualism in language programming, assessing the effect of bilingualism on using Persian passive structures is important. Theoretical framework of this research is Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) according to which, two kinds of passive structures including main passives and non-personal passives are recognized.

In this research, eighteen 5- to-7- year old Persian monolingual children (9 girls and 9 boys) and eighteen 5- to-7- year old Turkish-Persian bilingual children were monitored to see if they produce and comprehend Persian passive structures. These children were selected randomly from the schools of Tehran and Sarab. In order to assess children’s comprehension and production of passive sentences, pictorial tests were used. Independent variables in the experiment are multilingualism and age and dependent variables are the comprehension and production of passive sentences. To do the experiment, sentences were made using 16 Persian verbs including: eat, milk, cut, plant, break, wash, kill, cook, write, sew, draw, weave, build, dig, pick, and steal. Afterwards, pictorial cards were drawn showing the action represented by the verb. Tests were organized in 4 parts. The first three tests, analyzing the comprehension and production of main and non-personal passive sentences, are the ones introduced by Demuth (2013). The forth test, a production test, is Manetti's (2013).Analyzing the data using SPSS, version 19, we found out that both bilingual and monolingual children have the ability of comprehending and producing passive structures of Persian language. So, multilingualism and age do not have a significant effect on the comprehension and production of main and non-personal passive verbs. Also the results showed that children most often tend to generalize the voice structure they hear to newly given situations i.e. when they are questioned about a patient (3rd test), they may or may not produce a passive sentence but when they are presented with a model passive structure in one case, the children copy the structure they hear to new situations.




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Language Related Research
Volume 9, Issue 5 - Serial Number 47
November and December 2018
Pages 119-145