Study of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in 3-5 Years Old Farsi-Speaking Children

摘要

Almost every sentence contains a verb. A verb describes a situation --- an event or a state of being; in many languages, the time and nature of this situation are marked by tenses. There is no t any study about verb tense inflection in speech of Farsi speaking children. The main goal of this survey is to analyze inflection of future, present and past tenses of regular and irregular verbs in Farsi language, on 3 - 5 years old normal children. 160 F arsi speaking and normal children ( 80 boys and 80 girls) at the age range of 3 - 5 years old, within 4 age groups (36 - 42, 43 - 48, 49 - 54, 55 - 60) evaluated with the "expressive pictorial task for verb tense inflections on 3 - 5 years old Persian (Farsi) - speaking normal children". The scores of the participants were used to analyze the following features: Ability of regular and irregular verb tense inflections. Correlation of regular and irregular verb tense inflections and the age of participants. Di fference of s cores among 4 age groups and among boys and girls, and regular and irregular verbs. Comparing average score of regular and irregula r verbs shows that the mean of regular verbs is significantly better than the mean of irregular verbs. Comparing the average score of all four age groups shows that they don't have significant differences with each other. Regular verb tense inflection are better than the irregular verb tense inflection among subjects and their genders do not affect their ability of expressing ve rbs. The results of this study lead us to the U shape and N shape curve on developmental process of children.