Phonological disorders in the acquisition of Farsi and optimality theory

Phonological disorders in the acquisition of Farsi and Optimality Theory Froogh Shooshtaryzadeh Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India The present study considers and compares phonological acquisition in typically developing children (TD) and the children with functional (non-organic) phonological disorder (PD) who are acquiring Farsi as their first language. The main hypothesis of this study is that ‘phonological acquisition in the children with phonological disorder is different from typically developing children both in terms of the time needed to acquire language and in terms of the organization of their internalized grammar’. To test this hypothesis, data are collected from five TD children (2;6 to 4) and five PD children (4;6 to 6) through two types of tests, i. e. Naming-Picture task and Action-Picture task. The productions of each child were recorded and then were listened to carefully by judges and were transcribed using the IPA. There was also a 15-30 minutes free recording for each child. The data was analysed and the results were considered in Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince, 1994, 1995). This study has concluded that phonological development in children with functional phonological disorder is different from the typically developing children not only in the amount of the time needed for phonological acquisition, but also in the organization of their internalized grammar. Key words: typical phonological acquisition, phonological disorder, Farsi, Optimality Theory ISBN 9783862886326. LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 56. 270pp. 2015.