"A Review of the Acquisition and Development of Farsi as a First Language"

Chomsky's innate theory of language has had a significant impact on first language acquisition studies. The studies in the 60s through 80s focused on child language in order to recognize the stages of development, and propose new theories forbetter understanding of first language acquisition. The current study aims to: 1.Review the first language acquisition and development theories in general, and 2. review and analyze the previous studies on the acquisition and development of Farsi as a first language in particular to reveal the current status of research findings in the field. To these aims, the related studies were referred to in three indexing resources: Magiran, Noormags, SID from 1365 to 1394. Seventy-six articles were found and put into five categories: causal-correlational, descriptive, review, comparative, and reliability and validity studies. The analysis of the findings indicated that most of the studies have been conducted in the field of rehabilitation, considering variables relating to language acquisition and development impairment. There were a few descriptive studies investigating the development of Farsi as a first language. Finally, the research designs seem to be ignorant of Tomasello's usage-based theory, Bruner's pragmatic theory, Halliday's functional theory, and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning.