Acquisition of bitransitive sentences in Persian and Chinese: differences between comprehension and production tests.

48 Iranian and 48 Chinese children, from 3 to 5 yr. old, were tested for their comprehension and production of two forms of bitransitive sentences in their respective languages. There was evidence that sentential forms in which the transfer object was mentioned next to the transfer action were acquired better by the subjects than those in which the two were separated by the recipient of the transfer object. Sentences that were closer in structural or semantic aspects to extra-linguistic experiences were handled better. Some differences were obtained between sentence comprehension and sentence production, apparently due to psychomotor factors in the language-related behaviors of the children.