Investigating morphosyntactic and semantic measures in bilingual Azeri-Persian speaking children aged 5.5 to 6.5 years with and without language impairment

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate morphosyntactic and semantic measures in bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking children aged 5.5–6.5 years with and without language impairment. In this cross-sectional study, the bilingual participants were thirty children with language impairment (LI) and fifteen typically developing children (TD) who were selected from nurseries and Speech therapy clinics. The language samples were collected through story-telling in Azeri and Persian languages, separately. The linguistic analysis was done based on morphosyntactic and semantic parameters. The Alberta Language and Development Questionnaire (ALDeQ) parent report questionnaire was completed via interviewing with the parents to differentiate language impairment from language differences. Study findings revealed a significant difference between the morphosyntactic and semantic scores in two groups of bilingual Azeri-Persian speaking LI and TD children (p ˂ 0.05). Also, the results demonstrated no significant relationship between the scores of linguistic scores and age in LI and TD children (p < 0.05). According to the result of the study, morphosyntactic and semantic parameters of language samples in bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking children could be utilized to provide diagnostic information for speech and language pathologists in LI children among bilingual Azeri-Persian communities.