Developmental process in the use of lexical cohesive devices in the Persian-speaker children

In this study, based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) description of cohesion in English, the ability of Persian- speaker children to organize a narrative discourse has been investigated, applying an experimental method. For this purpose, fifteen children, eight boys and seven girls, four to seven years old, have been selected in a crèche in the West of Tehran. Afterwards, in order to investigate their performance in organizing discourse by applying lexical cohesive devices, two tests, story retelling and story production based on two pictorial books, have been performed and then investigated. The main objective of this study has been to evaluate their discourse competence through their narrative discourse organizing ability. Based on the findings of this research, it can be said that children in all age groups are able to apply the correct lexical cohesive devices in order to organize their stories. The other result is that all age groups tend to apply "repetition" rather than “collocation" in both tests. Finally, the children's performance in story retelling test comparing with story production test was different, in terms of the number of utterances and lexical cohesive devices used.