Bilingual Narrative development in Mazandarani-Farsi children

Iran is a multicultural and multilingual country. Bilingualism has always been a matter of interest to the scholars in different fields like linguistics, psychology, and sociolinguistics. Studying the linguistic and cognitive features and the development of the two languages in bilingual children are of great importance in many regards like education, language development, and language planning. This study aims at analyzing Farsi and Mazandarani narratives of bilingual Mazandarani-Farsi children aged 4-6 in order to study the language development in these children according to age and to compare their development in each of these two languages. The narratives are analyzed at the micro and macro structure levels in four age groups: (A: 4-4.5; B: 4.5-5; C: 5-5.5; D: 5.5-6). The results show that the narratives get more complicated as the children grow and "age" has a significant effect on these categories at macro and microstructure levels: action, consequence, coordinating conjunction, and mental and verbal processes. Comparison of MLU and the total number of words in Farsi and Mazandarani narratives indicates that there is no significant difference between narratives according to age and the language.