Education and Grammaticality Judgments on Persian Principles and Parameters

Abstract

Introduction: The innateness of language faculty and universal constraints, especially its independency from other mental disciplines, is a robust theory yet under investigation. This study is another contribution to making decisions on competence through performance. Methodology: The project applied an expressive grammaticality judgment task on principles and parameters of the Persian language and tested 24 native speakers’ claims on the statements in question. Results: The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (principles and parameters), each having two subcategories (Structure dependency and Projection principles, Head and Null-subjects (5-year-old) performance on principle- and parameter-judgments differed from their older counterparts (9-year-old), indicating the superior ability of the school-age group in distinguishing grammatically well-formed and ill-formed Persian principles and parameters. Conclusion: Since the older group attended elementary level (third grade), the interpretation of such results may pertain to education