Compliments and compliment-responses form adjacency pairs. These pairs include two utterances by two speakers in which not only the first utterance gives rise to the second utterance, but also necessitates that the second one be of a special kind. Compliments are culture-dependent conventional phrases, but they are not fixed. This paper studies compliment responses in Persian speakers. In the first part of this paper we present a description and classification of compliment responses in Persian speakers and refer to the cultural misunderstandings caused by their misuse. For example one of the most common responses (especially used by women) to a compliment like: “what a nice dress you have!” is to say “your eyes are beautiful,” which is a different version of “your eyes see it beautiful”. If a man gives such a response to a woman, this response may be interpreted differently. On the other hand this response can be given only to those compliments in which the eye has a central role, so one can not use it as a response to “what a delicious food you have cooked!” The second part of this paper is a comparison of compliments responses in 60 children (aged 6 – 8 year) and 60 educated adults. We used the “what a nice x” pattern and then recorded all their responses. ‘X’ was one of their personal belongings. The results show a great difference between the two groups. While adults use conventional formulaic phrases as compliment response, children do not use these fixed phrases and instead give an explanation (or description) about the complimented object.

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