Phonological development in Persian-speaking children: A cross-sectional study

Purpose: The Persian language is a member of the Western Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family within the Indo-European language family. Here, we aimed to study phonological development in Persian-speaking children. Method: The speech samples were collected from 387 children, aged 3-6 years old, using two picture-naming tasks: Persian Articulation and Phonology tests, which were used to study phonetic and phonemic inventories, phoneme accuracy, and the age of error patterns suppression. Result: Vowels are acquired at three or earlier. Acquisition of all consonants in the initial position precedes that of the final position. Older children had higher values in phoneme accuracy compared with those of the younger children. Although no significant effects of gender on phonological development were found, girls had higher accuracy scores compared with boys. Final devoicing and cluster reduction were the last error patterns which were suppressed by 6.0. Conclusion: The results showed that the accuracy of children's productions grew with age and the number of error patterns decreased. It seems that there are some similarities between phonological developments in different languages; however, it is still important to study language specific tendencies to be used in clinical settings and speech sound development research.