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Background and Aim: The auditory system changes by increasing age in both central and peripheral parts. The purpose of this study was to  investigate the effect of the increasing the stimulus rate on auditory brainstem response (ABR)  waves latency in old population with normal hearing.
Materials and Methods : In this cross-sectional study click ABR test performed on 20 young normal-hearing subject with mean age of 20.8 years old and 10 old normal-hearing subject with mean age of 66.4 years old. ABR results with different stimulus rates were compared between two group.
Results : ABR peak latencies and interpeak intervals were prolonged with increasing the click repetition rate. Peak latencies were slightly prolonged in older adults and the I-V interval did not differ with age but prolongation of  III-V interval were significantly differs in older population compared to young adults.
Conclusion : Using high click rates may sensitize the ABR to the identification. of lesions of auditory nerve or brainstem , but before that , we need to know the normal range of different age groups , so that we can decide about probability of a retrocochlear lesion.

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Background and Aim: The purpose of this research is to study the standardization of speaking and reading rates in a group of normal speaker of female students, and to compare them. As the rate of speech is an important variable in the evaluation and treatment of stuttering, cluttering, dysarthria and apraxia.

Materials and Method: One hundred of second grade students of primary school and an equal number of fifth grade students participated in this study. All subjects were native speakers of Farsi, who passed an informal, screening test of articulation and speech. None of the subjects had a history of speech, hearing, or neurological disorders. The subjects were asked to read from the 180 words portion of their Farsi book and tell story. Their speech was recorded by using a tape recorder. Then the data were analyzed for word and syllable rate. In transcribing the samples, single morpheme was counted as single word and compound words were counted as two words if they had two free morphemes. Non-word interjections were excluded from word and syllable counts while word interjections and repeated words were included in the count. Independent t-test and paired t-test were used for analyzing.

Results: In the second grade students the reading rate is, on the average, 189.4 syllable per minute (SPM)(94.9 word per minute(WPM), 3.1 syllable per second(SPS)) and the talking rate is 189.8 SPM (99.1 WPM, 3.1 SPS) and in the fifth grade student the reading rate is 223.9 SPM (119.0 WPM, 3.7SPS) and the talking rate is 210.26 SPM (109.5 WPM , 3.4 SPS).

Conclusion: The result highlight that in the fifth grade students, reading rates are higher than talking rates while in the second grade they are not, because they do not have enough skills for whole word reading. A remarkable finding in this research is that, reading and talking rates in the fifth grade students are higher than the second grade students.

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Background and Aim: Regions in the cochlea with no (or very few) functioning inner hair cells and/or neurons are called dead regions. The aim of this study was to identify the cochlear dead regions in moderate to profound sensory neural hearing impaired children through the Threshold equalizing noise (TEN_HL) test.
Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the TEN(HL) was performed for the all frequencies available on test CD, on 30 children with ages ranging from five to forteen years (mean age, 8.5 ±2.8 years old).
Results: In this study, 58.3% of ears were found to have a dead region for at least one frequency. Classifying by test frequencies, 20% were found to have a dead region, 24% to be inconclusive and 56% to have no dead regions. The difference between mean SNR(T) in ears with and without dead regions was statistically significant. The difference between mean absolute thresholds in two groups was statistically significant at 1000 Hz and below (p <0.05).
Conclusion: The results indicated a relatively high prevalence of dead regions in children with sensory neural hearing impairment, especially for frequencies at which the hearing loss exceeds 70 dB HL.

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Background and Aim: Children with speech and language disorders can have reduced diadochokinesis (DDK) rates. Although a relationship has been proposed between DDK and the rate of speech, there is no consensus among the experts and its credibility remains questioned. The purpose of this study was to compare oral DKK with the rate of speech and reading in normal students.

Methods: One hundred second grade female students participated in this descriptive-comparative study. The subjects were asked to read a text of their book, tell a story, and perform some oral DDK tasks. The elapsed time was measured by Cool Edit software. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the data. Data analysis was performed using Student t-test.

Results: Time history durations of DDK tasks /tâ/, /pâ/ and /kâ/ were 4.10, 4.15 and 4.74 ms, respectively. The rate of reading was 3.1 syllables per second and rate of talking was 2.8 syllables per second. No relationship between the rate of speech and DDK was found, still, we found a significant association between the reading rate and DDK in /kâ/ (p=0.03) and /pâtâkâ/ (P<0.01).

Conclusion: Relevant DDK tasks can be utilized in order to improve the reading rate. Reading rate was higher than speech rate and the rate of bilabial diadochokinesis in mono syllables is the highest rate that may be expected during the treatments.

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Background and Aim: High incidence of speech disorders in children with cerebral palsy could be related to a deficiency in processing of auditory stimuli. So it is vital to check out any peripheral or central disorders in auditory system using behavioral and electrophysiological auditory tests.
Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 15 children with spastic diplegia, mean age 5.77, SD 2.26 years, and 15 normal children, mean age 5.33, SD 1.80 years, were tested using pure tone audiometry, immittance and auditory brainstem responses. The results were compared between the two groups.
Results: Hearing thresholds and middle ear status were in normal range in all participants however, contralateral acoustic reflex thresholds were mostly elevated. Comparing absolute latency and interpeak latency intervals of auditory brainstem responses between the two groups, absolute latency interval of later waves, and in specific the V wave, was significantly longer in diplegic children (p=0.04) resulting in a longer III-V interpeak latency intervals (p=0.02).
Conclusion: Neurological disorders in ponto-reticulo-spinal pathway, pontine reticular nuclei and upper pons which are adjacent to auditory nuclei of lateral leminiscus and inferior colliculus result in auditory dys-synchrony and increased latency intervals in latter waves of auditory brainstem responses. This could also attributed to functional disorders in wave-generating sites in these patients.

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Background and Aim: Most of the researches are about bilingual children with specific language impairment and importance of it in recognition and treatment. This study aimed to assess verb morphology in bilinguals with specific language impairment (SLI) and compare them with normal bilinguals.

Methods: Six bilingual (Azeri and Persian) children with specific language impairment at the age of 7-8 years were collected from clinics of Tehran, Iran. They were evaluated about verb morphology using narrative speech and specific language impairment test and then, compared with six age-matched and six other language-matched children as control group. Children with specific language impairment were diagnosed by exhibiting a significant delay (more than one year) in language that can not be explained by intelligence deficits, hearing loss or visual impairment. We used Man-Whitney test for comparing the groups.

Results: Bilingual children with specific language impairment had delay in comparison with their age-matched group in subject-verb agreement (p=0.020) and articulating tense morphemes (p=0.019). They also had meaningful delay in using proper tense of verbs (past, present, and future) in comparison with language-matched control group (p=0.029).

Conclusion: Comparison of typical development of bilingual children and bilinguals with specific language impairment shows that verb morphology is a good clinical marker for diagnosing and treatment of these children.

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Background and Aim: Speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses were used in the assessment of subcortical encoding of the speech stimuli in the English language. These processes are affected by language background and experiences. Considering the language specific acoustic differences, the aim of current study was establishing the response norms in adult Persian-speakers and comparing the encoding of the speech syllable /da/ between Persian and English languages.

Methods: Auditory brainstem responses to speech syllable /da/ in the right ear, gained from 48 normal adults (25 women and 23 men) with the mean age of 22.70 with SD 2.05 years were recorded. After characterizing the onset elements, transition from consonant to vowel, the periodic portion and offset of response, the Persian dataset were compared with 95% confidence interval norms in the age range of 18-28 years.

Results: The response to speech syllable /da/ was successfully recorded in all of the subjects and main features of response were highly overlapped with published English norms.

Conclusion: Normative values for speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses in adult Persian speakers are presented in the current survey. Our findings suggest that the recommended procedure and more importantly, the scoring method based on English norms can be used in Persian speakers without replacing the original synthetic vowel /da/.

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Background and Aim: Auditory and visual processing along with phonological and visual spatial working memory are the problems that patients with dyslexia struggle with. So, the aim of this project was to investigate the effectiveness of computerized cognitive training on the working memory performance of children with dyslexia.

Methods: The study conducted under the quasi-experimental method with pre- and post-test along with the control group. 25 children with dyslexia aged 7 to 12 years in grades 1-5 assigned to the experimental (15) and control (10) groups the experimental group received 30 sessions of the Brain Ware Safari intervention program. NAMA scale and Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C) were conducted to assess reading and working memory performance of the subjects. MANCOVA, ANCOVA and effect sizes were utilized to analyze the data.

Results: There were significant differences between pre- and post-tests of the experimental and control groups on the forward and backward block recall subtests of WMTB-C and not the mazes memory. Regarding the subscales of NAMA scale, we found no significant differences in the reading performance but analysis of effect sizes showed positive effects at least on the 6 subscales.

Conclusion: The Brain Ware Safari computerized cognitive training can improve visual spatial working memory of children with dyslexia and probably may affect the reading performance.