Study of Verb Tenses Inflection in Speech of Persian-Speaking Normal Three to Five Year- Old Children

Verbs of every sentence have the capability of explaining a situation. Time and essence of that situation is defined by the verb tenses. Turmoil of verb tense inflection appears in most children with speech and language disorder. In Farsi there is no solid research that studies the ability of expressing verb tense inflections on children. The main goal of this survey is to analyze inflection of future, present and past tenses in Farsi, on 3- 5 year old normal children. In this study, 160 Farsi speaking and normal children between the ages 3-5, are chosen from Tehran’s kindergardens. The participants were evaluated with the “expressive pictorial task for verb tense inflections on 3-5 year old Persian (Farsi)-speaking normal children”. This study is an analytical descriptive type. Statistical paired T test is used to compare tenses with each other and The Pearson correlation coefficient is used to calculate correlation coefficient of participant’s score of verb tense inflection and their age. All of the statistical analysis is done with the SPSS version 17. According to the results of this study, the minimum score average belongs to past tense that is 6.96, and the maximum score average is for future tense with a score of 8.37. The lowest score average among all four age groups is43- 48 month olds which is about 22.55 and the highest score average belongs to 55-60 month olds at 23.90. (P<0.05). Comparing the average score of all four age groups shows that they don’t have significant differences with each other, whereas the differences between average score of future, present and past tenses are significant. 3- 5 year old normal children have more capability of expressing future tense inflection compared to the present tense, and their ability to express present tense inflection is more than past tense. Children at the age range of 43-48 months have less capability and Children at the age range of 55-60 months have the most capability in expressing verb tense inflection compared to the rest of the groups. These conclusions approve the U shaped curve forchild development processes.