Persian Preschoolers Show Stronger Expressive Than Receptive Prosody, Study Finds

Preschool children speaking Persian develop the ability to express prosody—pitch, rhythm, and stress in speech—earlier than the ability to understand it, according to a preliminary cross-sectional study published in BMC Pediatrics. Prosodic competence is fundamental to language acquisition and to syntactic processing, and identifying developmental trajectories in Persian-speaking children is critical for clinical identification of communication disorders. To address that gap, researchers Tooba Arbabi-Sarjou, Mersede Imani-Shakibayi, and Talieh Zarifian evaluated 128 Persian-speaking children—64 girls and 64 boys—grouped into four six-month age bands between 3 and 5 years.

Each child was assessed with the Persian version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C), a tool that measures both receptive prosody, meaning the ability to understand meaning conveyed through intonation and stress, and expressive prosody, the ability to produce it. The team analyzed the results using multivariate analysis of variance, repeated-measures ANOVA, and multiple linear regression, with statistical significance set at α = 0.05. Age had a significant effect on performance in both domains.

For receptive prosody, the age-group effect was highly significant (p < .001, η² = 0.19), and follow-up analyses showed significant age effects on every receptive subtest, with the largest effects for short-item discrimination (p < .001, η² = 0.36) and long-item discrimination (p < .001, η² = 0.299). For expressive prosody, the age effect was also significant (p < .001, η² = 0.12), with significant effects on all expressive subtests except chunking, which fell just short of the threshold (p = .05). The most striking result was the overall asymmetry between the two domains.

Expressive scores were higher than receptive scores across the sample (p < .001, η² = 0.75), accompanied by a significant domain-by-age interaction (p = .009, η² = 0.09). In other words, the children could produce meaningful prosodic contrasts more readily than they could interpret them, and the size of that gap changed with age. The authors suggest that expressive prosody may reach functional competence earlier in this linguistic context, though they frame this as an exploratory observation from a preliminary study rather than a settled conclusion about Persian language development.

The study also examined whether family environment shaped these skills. Maternal education was positively associated with receptive prosody, while both maternal education and maternal employment were associated with expressive prosody. Shared parent–child book reading was positively associated with both receptive and expressive prosody, making it the only home activity linked to both domains.

Playtime showed a borderline association with receptive prosody (p = .05), while screen time was not significantly associated with either domain. These environmental associations come with an important caveat. Because the study is cross-sectional, capturing children at a single point in time rather than following them over years, the reported links between home environment and prosodic skill are associations only and do not imply causality.

The researchers also note that the assessment tool itself may require refinement. The Persian PEPS-C adaptation is part of an ongoing effort to build language-specific instruments for prosodic assessment, and the authors recommend further investigation of language-specific prosodic development and continued refinement of the tool before it is used to draw firm clinical conclusions.

For clinicians and speech-language pathologists working with Persian-speaking families, the study offers a first developmental snapshot of prosodic skills between ages 3 and 5, along with preliminary evidence that maternal education, maternal employment, and shared book reading are the environmental factors most consistently linked to stronger performance. The authors describe their work as a foundation for larger, longitudinal studies that can confirm these patterns and support reliable clinical identification of communication disorders in Persian-speaking preschoolers.

Subject of Research: Development of receptive and expressive prosodic skills in Persian-speaking preschool children

Article Title: Receptive and expressive prosodic skills in Persian-speaking children aged 3 to 5 Years: a preliminary study

Article References: Arbabi-Sarjou, T., Imani-Shakibayi, M., & Zarifian, T. (2026). Receptive and expressive prosodic skills in Persian-speaking children aged 3 to 5 Years: a preliminary study. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07927-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07927-8

Keywords: prosody, language acquisition, preschool children, Persian language, PEPS-C, maternal education, book reading, screen time, cross-sectional study, speech development, socioeconomic status, BMC Pediatrics