Auditory Perception of Persian Interrogatives from a Psycholinguistic Approach and its Application in Persian teaching

This study investigates the processing of Persian interrogatives. The questions is the cognitive load during the processing of types of interrogatives. Which type of interrogatives is processed faster than the others and why? The theoretical framework is structuralism and cross modal view point. The corpus contained 120 interrogative sentences besides 120 Persian words and non-words. Cross-modal lexical decision has been used by the use of special software estimating reaction time of subjects. Independent variable is the type of interrogative and the dependent variable is subjectsˈ reaction times to the lexical decision task. 25 students of universities aged 18-30 participated in this study classified into two groups of male and female. The first experiment show that one single moved wh-questions in complex sentences manifested in sentences like “chi-yā ro fek mikoni/?u fardā biyāre?” (What do you think he will bring?) is processed sooner than dissociated coordinated interrogatives contained in complex sentences and also optional interrogatives manifested in complex sentences . This shows that topicalization of the wh- word will lead to the ease of processing. The independent variable of participants̓ gender showed to be effective in the first experiment for the results showed that women are faster in reaction times than men. The second experiment results showed that the independent variable of syntactic structure (either simple or complex) is to be ineffective both across men and women. The findings of current investigation can be used to manage better lesson plans and curriculum design based on objective psycholinguistic findings.