LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONS: A STUDY ON IRANIAN CHILDREN ACQUIRING PERSIAN AS THEIR FIRST LANGUAGE

The issue of children's acquisition of word orders of various structures among different languages has always been a hot topic and has been the subject of a challenging debate. Various types are reported for locative alternations in English than Persian. Therefore, the current study focuses on the probability of using locative construction alternation among Iranian children learning Persian as their first language. In fact, we have tried to study the prepositions: in, on, under, behind, in front of, above, between, next to and near when part of complex prepositions and when conveying location alone and hence, concluding that which ones may be acquired first. To this end, 30 children, both male and female aging from 3 to 6 years old were chosen as the participants of the study. The researchers have employed an elicitation technique in which some of the most frequently used locative prepositions are required to be utilized; they used some pictures and motivated the subjects to utter what they could perceive. Then, after analyzing the collected data it was found that there exists a significant difference in learning locative prepositions by Iranian children in acquiring their first language. Results showed that children found difficulties in the functional use of prepositions. Also, the findings suggested that the acquisition of locative prepositions in childhood is not complete at the time of their appearance in speech. This is a complex process which is not completed until approximately age 7.