An Investigation of the Acquisition of Negation and Interrogative in Sorani Kurdish: A Case Study

Some studies have tackled the issues of describing Sorani Kurdish and its lexical and syntactic features. Little, however, has been done with regard to comparing syntactic development in this dialect of Kurdish language with other languages. Taking the “focused naturalistic” (O` Grady, 2005) approach and through exploring the acquisition of the interrogative and negation in Sorani Kurdish, this case study investigates the agreement of the its syntactic development with other languages including English. Literature review and what came up through observing and video recording of the linguistic productions of a baby son from 6 to 37 months of age indicate that, irrespective of their first languages, children undergo the same developmental processes in learning these syntactic features. The study highlights the role of the innate capability of language acquisition and goes for the generative side of the extreme has been proposed for investigating the first language syntactic development. The study recommends taking these developmental stages into account in teaching and learning processes.