Receptive and Expressive Prosodic Functions in 5-10 Year-Old Typically-Developing Farsi-Speaking Children: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Approach

Recently, the psycholinguistic approach has been used to understand reception and expression of prosodic skills in several languages. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the receptive and expressive functions of prosody based on the psycholinguistic approach in 5-10 year-old typically-developing children in a Farsi-speaking population.
This cross-sectional study recruited 60 typically-developing children (30 males and 30 females) in three age-groups of 5-6, 7-8 and 9-10 years old. At first, the Turn-end, Affect, Chunking and Focus tasks (both receptive and expressive) were designed by researchers with regard to the prosodic functions in Farsi based on the psycholinguistic approach. The tasks were then completed by all enrolled subjects.
The 5-6 and 7-8 year-old groups scored above 12 (chance level) in all receptive and expressive tasks except for the expressive focus, while the 9-10 year-old subjects scored near the ceiling scores in all tasks. In Turn-end and Focus, receptive and expressive mean scores were significantly different across age groups (p≤0.05). The analysis showed a significant correlation between the receptive and expressive performance in Turn-end and Focus (p≤0.05)
The receptive and expressive prosodic functions seem to develop by age in typically-developing Farsi-speaking children. The performance of Farsi-speaking children in reception and expression tasks of prosodic functions in 5-6 year-old kids appears to be above chance. Meanwhile, the acquisition of the Focus output skill seems to delay until the age of 10.