Forms of Prosody in 5-10 Year-Old Typically-Developing Children in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach

Prosody refers to the use of phonetic and acoustic features systematically; it plays a vital role in human communication interactions and language development. Prosodic aspects of communication, academic, and developmental are essential to humans. Given the important role of prosody skills in social communication interactions, language development, and academic level, this study aimed to investigate forms of prosody in 5–11 years–old typically–developing Persian –Speaking Children based on the psycholinguistic approach using the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech–Communication (PEPS–C). Furthermore, we studied the effect of age and gender on the development of prosody skills in 5 – 11year Old Persian speaking children.

This cross–sectional study recruited on 105 girls and 105 boys, who were typically–developing children, aged 5–10 in three age–groups, namely, 5–6, 7–8, and 9–10 years old in Tehran. Their short and long discrimination and imitation prosodic skills evaluated by using the Discrimination and Imitation subtests of the Persian version of Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech–Communication (PPEPS–C). In the PPEPS–C, each subtest has two examples, two practice items, and 16 test items. In the Discriminative tasks, score 1 represents correct responses and score 0 incorrect ones. The examiner used a keyboard to record the results of participants in the Imitation tasks based on the auditory–perceptual judgment. For the imitation tasks, score 1 shows good imitation, score 0.5 demonstrates relatively good, and 0 represents incorrect imitation. In each subtest, the score of 12 or higher means that the child is competent. Non–parametric Kruskal Wallis and Mann–Whitney tests were used to compare the performance of children between age and sex groups.

The results showed children acquired the score lower than the level of competence (<12) only in the task of Long–item discrimination in the age group of 5–6 years while in the age groups of 7–8 and 9–10 years, the score of children in the all subtests were higher than the level of competence (>12). In all age groups, children achieved the lowest score in the long–item discrimination and the highest score in the short–item imitation subtest. The results differentiated by gender showed that both groups of children achieved the score equal to or higher than the level of competence (>12) in all subtests. Moreover, the results showed boys made the lowest and highest score in the long–item discrimination and short–item imitation subtests, respectively while the lowest and highest scores acquired in the long–item discrimination and long–item imitation tasks by girls, respectively.  The score of children was significantly different according to the age groups in all form tasks (p<0.05). However, the difference between girls and boys was only significant in short–item imitation and long–item discrimination tasks (p<0.05).

The ability to discrimination and imitation prosody in 5–10 years–old typically–developing Persian –speaking children progress regarding age. However, it seems Persian children achieve a lot more skills in discrimination and imitation of prosody in younger ages compared to their peers in other languages. After seven years old, Persian children acquire the ability to discriminate and imitate prosody and can use these skills in communication and social interaction. Moreover, there are notable differences in the performance of Persian children regarding to gender in some of the ability of discrimination and imitation of prosodic forms.</div>