Background and Aim: Since knowing the mechanisms which evoke non-fluency is the first step in the treatment of stuttering, and there are very few researches in Persian which consider the role of the linguistic factors behind  stuttering , this study is an attempt to provide answers to some of numerous questions about stuttering by comparing  the stuttered words` type in stuttered children and adults. 
Materials and Methods: In this study stuttered people were divided into 5 age groups as follows: 3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 13-16, and older than 17 years old. Each group had ten participants. Forty-two of the 50 participants were male , and the youngest person was 3 years old and the eldest one was 32 years old. The study method involved recording at least 5 minuets of spontaneous speech of every one who was diagnosed of suffering from stuttering by two speech and language pathologists. The percent of non-fluency on every word&aposs type was determined where a content word was followed or preceded by a function word (Function-Function-Content words and Function-Content words contexts). Then these findings were analyzed by Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. 
Results:  The results of this study show while function words are dominantly more stuttered than content words in children less than 13 years old in Function-Function-Content words context, we consider more disfluency on content words and second function word by getting old. We consider more stuttering on function words in children less that 13 years old in Function-Content words context too and increased non-fluency on content word by growing up. Results also show meaningful differences between the fifth group and others in the amount of stuttering on second function word in the Function-Function-Content words contexts and also between the first group and the others in amount of non-fluency both on function and content words in Function-Content words context.
Conclusion: people who stutter from Farsispeakers populations exhibit almost differential patterns of disfluency in different ages. Young speakers who stutter are predominantly disfluent on function words. There is an exchange of disfluencies from function to content words as speakers get older. Disfluencies on both function and content words are so rarely in Function-Content words and Function-Function-Content words contents. These findings support the view that stuttering on function words in children is a way of getting time to complete the next content word&aposs plan. These exchange findings are similar to what is found in English and Spanish languages and explained by the EXPLAN model.

Background and Aim: The short-term memory (STM) has been studied to a great extent so far. Using some strategies and techniques to help the subject to access to his/her memory is important for Speech pathologist. Priming is a process that increases the chance of accessing to some information of memory by means of some simulations. So, primings are some words which facilitate the retrieval of the target words. The purpose of this study is comparing phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span.
Materials and Methods: The research was conducted on sixty-four 18-25 year-old male students in Tehran University of Medical sciences. Due to some distortion factors, including bilingualism, stutter-ing, and articulation problem, that can effect the reaction time, were determined as exclusion critenia. In additiion, subjects with difficulty in Wepman auditory discrimination were ruled out. The test was performed via the second version of programmed DMDX software and reaction time was recorded.
Results: Semantic tasks and rhyming tasks were retrieved faster than the other tasks in lexical access respectively. There was a significant difference between the semantic and rime tasks but there is no significant difference between alliteration and unrelated tasks.
Conclusion: The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than the other levels and the phonological level is activated right after that. The alliteration level is the last level that activated. It has some similarities with some other investigations on the reaction time in phono-logical tasks

Background and Aim: Due to limitation of standardized tests for Persian-speakers with language disorders, spontaneous language sampling collection is an important part of assessment of language protocol. Therefore, selection of a language sampling method, which will provide information of linguistic competence in a short time, is important. Therefore, in this study, we compared the language samples elicited with picture description and storytelling methods in order to determine the effectiveness of the two methods.
Methods: In this study 30 first-grade elementary school girls were selected with simple sampling. To investigate picture description method, we used two illustrated stories with four pictures. Language samples were collected through storytelling by telling a famous children&aposs story. To determine the effectiveness of these two methods the two indices of duration of sampling and mean length of utterance (MLU) were compared.
Results: There was no significant difference between MLU in description and storytelling methods (p>0.05). However, duration of sampling was shorter in the picture description method than the story telling method (p<0.05).
Conclusion: Findings show that, the two methods of picture description and storytelling have the same potential in language sampling. Since, picture description method can provide language samples with the same complexity in a shorter time than storytelling, it can be used as a beneficial method for clinical purposes.

Background and Aim: Recently, researchers have increasingly turned to study the relation between stuttering and syntactic complexity. This study investigates the effect of syntactic complexity on the amount of speech dysfluency in stuttering Persian-speaking children and adults in conversational speech. The obtained results can pave the way to a better understanding of stuttering in children and adults, and finding more appropriate treatments.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the participants were 15 stuttering adult Persian-speakers, older than 15 years, and 15 stuttering child Persian-speakers of 4-6 years of age. In this study, first a 30 minute sample of the spontaneous speech of the participants was provided. Then the utterances of each person were studied in respect to the amount of dysfluency and syntactic complexity. The obtained information was analyzed using paired samples t-test.
Results: In both groups of stuttering children and adults, there was a significant difference between the amount of dysfluency of simple and complex sentences (p<0.05).
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that an increase in syntactic complexity in conversational speech, increased the amount of dysfluency in stuttering children and adults. Moreover, as a result of increase of syntactic complexity, dysfluency had a greater increase in stuttering children than stuttering adults.

Background and Aim: The ability of conversational repair is a subset of pragmatic language. When the listener does not understand the speaker&aposs intention, and the speaker cannot find a way of repairing the conversation to make his/her massage clear, communication will fail. This study aims to examine and compare the conversational repair skill in two groups of three and five year old children, to determine different conversational repair strategies and compare these skills among these groups.
Methods: One hundred and twenty Persian speaking children of three and five years of Ahwaz, Iran, were selected. The study tools were two series of pictures. During the retelling of the pictures the examiner created a situation to elicit a conversational repair strategy. Percentages of the usage of different kinds of conversational repair in each group were calculated and compared using student&aposs t-test.
Results: The usage of repetition and inappropriate response is decreased in the group of five year olds compared to the three year olds, but cue-repair and repetition method is increased. The addition method has remained relatively constant. There was a significant difference between average percentage of using repetition (p=0.04) and cue-repair (p=0.001) of the two groups. The percentage of application of repetition method in three year olds and cue-term method in five year olds were significantly higher than other conversational repair strategies.
Conclusion: With the increase in age and development of language skills the probability of using more complex and difficult strategies, like the cue-repair method, increases.

Background and Aim: Children with auditory processing disorders and impaired phonological working memory have difficulty in storing an accurate phonological representation of speech.

Therefore, it is highly important to assess phonological working memory in this population. One of the methods in assessing phonological working memory is to use a non-sense syllable test. The aim of this study is to create a valid and reiable non-sense syllable test in order to evaluate phonological working memory in Persian speaking children with auditory processing disorders.

Methods: In this cross sectional comparative study, 40 non-sense syllable words were developed according to the criteria of non-syllable word construction and under supervision of a linguistic specialist. The non-sense syllable test was assessed in 53 boys and 47 girls from 7 to 10 years of age. The content validity of the non-sense syllable words was assessed by experts. To evaluate the validity of the test, correlation between the results of the test and forward digit recall and backward digit recall tests were measured. The non-sense syllable test was performed twice to evaluate its relaibility.

Results: The validity of the non-sense syllable test was 95.5 (SD=2). The correlation coefficient between non-sense syllable repetition, forward digit recall, and backward digit recal l tests were 0.76 and 0.75 respectively (p<0.001). The correlation coefficient between different performances of non-sense syllable tests was 0.8 (p<0.001).

Conclusion: These findings show that the non-sense syllable repetition test can be used to evaluate phonological working memory in Persian speaking children from 7-10 years of age.