A survey on the role of Input processing theory in the perception of the subject position in the second language

Articles in Press

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
A. Rostami 1
R. M. Sahraei 2
B. Rahbar 3
1 Persian teacher and .Ph.D. Candidate in Teaching Persian to Non Persian speakers, The Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran;
2 Associate Professor of Linguistics, The Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran
3 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, The Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The current research aims to investigate the universality of the language by examining the perception of Persian learners in recognition of subject position according to the theory of input processing and the principle of the first noun from this theory. The first noun principle indicates that language learners consider the noun or pronoun that comes at the beginning of the sentence as the subject of the sentence.The participants in this research are 70 Persian language learners at elementary (23 participants), intermediate (23 participants) and advanced (24 participants) levels in the Persian language learning center of Al-Zahra University. Using Friedman et al.'s (2004) executive method, this study has examined the principle of the first noun as a predictable path in the education of Persian learners. In this direction, a test has been designed on Google Forms, and Persian learners have participated in two different implementations of this test in a time interval of 5 months. In both of its implementations, this test included 15 sentences that the language learners had to connect to the related pictures after hearing the sentences. In order to characterize the perception of the participants from the position of the subject, 8 sentences in the second sentence were put into the passive form. The results of this study have shown that the change of sentences in the second implementation of the test caused an increase in errors in the response rate of language learners and this was reported higher in elementary language learners than in other groups.

Keywords

Subjects

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Language Related Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 July 2025