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

Prosodic competence is fundamental to language acquisition and syntactic processing. Identifying developmental trajectories and environmental determinants in Persian-speaking children is critical for clinical identification of communication disorders. This study aimed to investigate (1) the developmental trajectory of receptive and expressive prosody in Persian-speaking children aged 3–5 years and (2) the association of socioeconomic status (SES) and home environment factors with these competencies. In this cross-sectional study, 128 children (64 girls, 64 boys), grouped into four six-month age bands, were evaluated using the Persian version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C). Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), repeated-measures ANOVA, and multiple linear regression, with statistical significance set at α = 0.05. Age had a significant effect on prosodic performance in both receptive and expressive domains. For receptive prosody, there was - a significant age-group effect, ( p < .001, η 2 = 0.19). Follow-up analyses indicated significant age effects for all receptive subtests, with the largest effects for short-item discrimination, ( p < .001, η 2 = 0.36), and long-item discrimination, ( p < .001, η 2 = 0.299). For expressive prosody, the - age effect was also significant, ( p < .001, η 2 = 0.12); significant age effects were found for all expressive subtests except chunking, ( p = .05). Higher expressive than receptive scores were observed overall, ( p < .001, η 2 = 0.75), with a significant domain-by-age interaction, ( p = .009, η 2 = 0.09). Maternal education was positively associated with receptive prosody, whereas maternal education and employment were associated with expressive prosody. Book reading was positively associated with both receptive and expressive prosody, whereas playtime showed a borderline association with receptive prosody ( p = .05); screen time was not significantly associated with either domain. Persian-speaking preschoolers demonstrated stronger performance in expressive than receptive prosodic abilities, suggesting that expressive prosody may reach functional competence earlier in this linguistic context. Environmental variables, particularly maternal education, maternal employment, and shared parent–child book reading, were positively associated with prosodic performance. Given the cross-sectional design, these exploratory associations do not imply causality, and future studies are warranted to further investigate language-specific prosodic development and tool refinement.