A Comparison of Language Development in Persian and Persian-Turkish Children Using PDSS as a Morpho-Syntactic Index

The stages of language acquisition in bilingual children are similar to those in their monolingual peers. At the same period of time, they produce the first words, memorize about 50 words, and begin to make sentences by combining words which they know. The process of language acquisition in simultaneous bilingual children is the same as that of monolinguals. A 5-month-old bilingual child is aware that s/he hears two languages, though the sounds of the two languages are very similar (Macrory, 2006, p. 164; Gauthier, 2012, p. 8).Due to the ongoing increase in the number of bilingual people as the result of some events such as migration, and considering the contradictory results of the studies concerning the effect of bilingualism on language development, the present study aims to compare the morpho-syntactic development of normal Persian and Persian-Turkish speaking children at three age groups of 37-46, 47-56 and 57-66 months old using Persian Developmental Sentence Scoring (PDSS) (Jalilehvand et al., 2016). It is expected that the morpho-syntactic development of the subjects will be the same in both language groups, with no statistically significant difference. The result of this study can provide evidence in support or rejecting the results of those studies (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2008; Blom, 2010; Dahlgren et al., 2017) indicating the superiority of the monolinguals’ verbal performance over their bilingual peers’.