PRONOMINAL REVERSAL IN PERSIAN: A CASE STUDY OF IRANIAN AUTISTIC CHILDREN

Although autism is a fairly common developmental brain disorder among the children of all nations, there has been very little research into this issue in some countries such as Iran. This paper considers one aspect of this complex and multidimensional developmental disorder known as “Pronominal Reversal” among the Iranian children suffering from Autism spectrum. Pronoun reversal is a language twist common among autistic children in which ASD children refer to themselves as he, she, or you, or by their own names. This study aims to report the findings of a case study carried out in summer 2013 on this phenomenon among Iranian autistic children whose native language is Persian, a pro-drop language of Indo-European family. The researchers observed, taped and transcribed the verbal productions of 20 Iranian autistic boys between the age of 5 to 10 years old in one of the rehabilitation clinics of the capital city of Tehran and the findings of this explanatory case study revealed that pronoun reversal is widely occurred in autistic Persian speakers and due to the fact that Persian is a pro-drop language, the speakers generally drop the subjective pronouns and the relative inflectional suffixes are reversed consequently. Although the research has been done within an Iranian context, the findings could be interesting and applicable to other pro-drop languages.