using passive voice and aspect in complement clauses in persian for arabic-and chinese-speaking learners

in recent decades, research on the processing of grammatical structures in different languages has played a crucial role in psychological and linguistic studies. the present research aims to examine the extent to which arabic- and chinese-speaking learners apply passive voice and aspect in complement clauses in their pieces of writing. to that end, syntactic and pragmatic criteria of applying and comprehending these structures were investigated among these learners. the the participants included 30 arabic- and 30 chinese-speaking learners of persian in at imam khomeini international university in qazvin. analyzing their pieces of writing, it was revealed that learners in advanced levels in both groups applied structures with aspect more frequently than the passive structures. in addition, arabic-speaking learners employed more structures with passive voice whereas chinese-speaking learners wrote fewer wrong structures in this regard. moreover, all chinese-speaking learners used passive structures properly while arabic-speaking learners used some of structures wrongly. in regard to aspect in complement clauses, findings showed that arab and chinese learners experienced identical difficulties, using this structure. furthermore, error analysis of passive voice in persian showed that learners in both groups committed the most frequent errors while the least frequent errors were related to the wrong combination of auxiliary and the main verb. in regard to complement clauses, the most and the least frequent errors were related to aspect and number, respectively.