Developmental patterns in the production of Discourse Markers in Persian-speaking children

Background and Aim: Discourse markers (DM) can relate different utterances in a discourse. They can also mark relations between discourse units and codify their meanings and Their primary purpose is to create conversation coherence (Schiffrin, ۱۹۸۷). DMs are not grammatically obligatory and by omitting them you can have correct propositional meaning and syntax: "badeΣ behesh goft be man chizeto midi, be man sharzh sharzh midi". They can be used at the beginning, between or end of clauses: "badan rubahe mige dashtam dadam be pesaram". DMs don't add propositional meaning "man nemidonam hala man chi kar konam". They are usually followed by a pause or hesitation: "rubahe goft khob, eshkal nadare!". Methods All children from two age groups (۱۰ seven-year-old children and ۱۰ ten-year-old children) were normal Persian monolinguals chosen from elementary school in Tehran. The retelling experiment (narrative context) was performed according to the method of Choi (۲۰۰۷) and Kyratizis and Ervin Tripp (۱۹۹۹). Based on the results obtained in the experimental group, the experiment was modified by the author. Results: Considering the importance of discourse markers in increasing children's verbal and linguistic skills and increasing the coherence level of their discourse (Gerhardt, ۱۹۹۰) the present research aims to examine the developmental patterns of discourse markers in Persian-speaking children. To achieve this goal, we ask them to reproduce a certain story. Conclusion: The results of the data analysis conducted by using descriptive and inferential statistics revealed that the Persian-speaking subjects in each two age groups used varieties of DMs. The difference between two age group in using some discourse markers was significant (Mann- Whitney test). The results showed that the frequency of DMs containing complex meanings was significantly lower than that of DMs containing simple meanings of addition and sequence by children in this study. Indeed, for DMs expressing simple relation of addition and sequence, the conceptual adaptation and linguistics word order were consistent with the sequence of events in real world. Thus, one could say that it is easier for children to understand and produce such DMs, and that children can easily have a mental representation of them.

Keywords:

discourse marker , discourse coherence , narrative discourse , storytelling , child language acquisition