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Objective: OAE an audiologic study for diagnosis of exteracochlear auditory neuropathy.
Method & Material: Immitance audiometry, OAE and ABR and rehabilitation Intervention was performed for 3 children suffered from kernictrus.
Conclusion: 1) OAE in the from of screening, distorted product and transient evoked-otoacoustic emission has to be added to our audiology test battery. 2) OAE studies have their own merit when we are clinically involved with the diagnosis of especial clinical entities like neonatal hypoxia, kernicterus, multiple sclerosis, meningitides and meningoencephalitis. 3) Case selection for cochlear implantation needs a knowledge of patients' OAE results. 4) In the case of intracerebral auditory neuropathy the need for other rehabilitative measures will be better understood.

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Background and Aim: Hearing assessment in infants and children younger than two years is an important issue, because the golden time of the language learning and speaking is under the age of two. Steady state auditory evoked potentials (SSAEPs) is one of the best ways of the objective hearing assessment for infants and young children. The need for long time of stimulation and recording restricted the clinical uses of this method. Therefore, the reduction of the recording time is a common problem. SSAEP signals are contaminated with background EEG signals of the brain and nervous system. To discriminate these signals the approach is using averaging method.
Materials and Methods: In this work two adaptive methods were programmed and tried on (SSAEP) signals. The first method was the work of the Ziarani et al. and the second was the enhanced Kalman filter. To assess suggested methods and to compare them with traditional averaging one, two sets of clinical signals prepared with Rotmen research group in university of Toronto were applied.
Results: The speed of the extraction of the SSAEP signals with the Ziarani method is 1.6 times faster than the averaging method. The extraction time of the enhanced adaptive Kalman filter is 13.1 times faster than currently used averaging methods.
Conclusion: The Kalman filter method seems to be more reliable than the other two methods. In addition, this new application of the Kalman filter in hearing assessment could be more beneficial and faster than other methods as an objective method.

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Background and Aim: Fluent aphasia and Alzheimer patients have difficulties in perception and naming. Patient with fluent Aphasia and Alzheimer disease, both have difficulty in perception and naming. Their site of lesion is also identical, that is temporoparietal lobe which is damaged in both group. This study investigates the effects of semantic and phonological cues in facilitation of word finding.
Materials and Methods: The study was prescriptive - analytic cross-sectional with 14 patients. The participants were seven fluent aphasia with mean age 48.4 year old and seven Alzheimer patients with mean age 69/71 year old and mean Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) 16 score. Those were assessed with Persian Naming Test. The Aphasic patients were selected from Tehran University hospitals and Alzheimer ones were from Rouzbeh hospital and Alzheimer Association of Iran.
Results: Mean semantic and phonological cues in fluent aphasia patients were 2.71 and 12.29, respectively, which significantly different (p=0.01), but those results were 8.29 and 3.43 in Alzheimer patients, that were not significantly different (p>0.05). A main result of this study was significant difference between two cues in both groups.
Conclusion: Two groups of patients use two cues in word finding. The correct responses increase with phonological cue in fluent aphasia but semantic cue has the main role for naming in Alzheimer patients.

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Background and Aim: Reading is one of the human's communicative skills. Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming are parts of the person's linguistic knowledge. Research in different languages and communities suggest that there is a relation between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading. To survey these relations in Persian language is the aim of this study.

Methods: In this study 130 male students from the first grade were selected at random. They were normal in IQ, visual and hearing status. Language development was also normal in these children. This study was a cross-sectional one. Pearson correlation coefficient and linear regression test were used to analyze data.

Results: The relation between phonological awareness and automatized rapid naming was significant (p<0.0001). Pearson correlation coefficient between phonological awareness and reading was direct (0.86). Pearson correlation coefficient between rapid automatized naming and reading was indirect that equals -0.87. In investigating the relation of two variables simultaneously with reading we concluded that the relation between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading is statistically significant (p<0.0001).

Conclusion: The results of this research revealed that in Persian language like other languages there is a relation between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and reading. Reading skills of children could be improved with this exercises.

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Background and Aim: Agrammatism is a phenomenon of neuropsychological relevance which has been recently investigated from conceptual and empirical aspects. The present study focuses on grammatical deficit in agrammatic aphasia. We evaluated the impairment of correct use of tenses of Persian verbs in agrammatic Broca&aposs aphasia.
Methods: Eight patients (mean age 57 years) participated in this descriptive - analytic study. They were classified as agrammatic Broca&aposs aphasia according to the Persian aphasia test, their CT Scan and MRI reports and other inclusion criteria. All patients but one were monolingual native speakers of Persian (Farsi). The other individual was bilingual whose dominant language was Persian. All subjects had a left unilateral brain lesion for at least one year after the onset of brain damage. The written sentence completion and picture sentence completion tests were designed and performed.
Results: Results do not indicate significant difference between Past Tenses of verb however, comparison of means showed best scores in Simple Past, Past Continuous, Present Perfect and Past Perfect, respectively. A main result of this study was significant difference between the mean of responses to Past Tense in comparison with Present Tense and Future (p=0.02).
Conclusion: Use of tense is impaired in agrammatic Broca&aposs aphasia in Persian. Our findings point out that use of Past Tense is impaired significantly more than the other tenses of verb.

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Background and Aim: Glottic closure pattern is one of the most important stroboscopic signs in judging the normality of laryngeal function. According to the recent researches, complete glottic closure is not the only pattern in normal phonation. The aim of this study was to investigate the glottic closure pattern in normal subjects and to understand the role of sex in having different glottic closure patterns.
Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 80 subjects (58 females and 22 males mean age of 21.19 years) were randomly selected from a population of 218 students. After taking a full medical history and performing perceptual and voice self assessment, subjects without any vocal disorders were recruited. Videolaryngoscopic assessment was performed during producing the vowel sound /i/ in habitual, high, low, loud and soft levels of phonation. Glottic closure patterns were analyzed in different phonation and also were compared between males and females.
Results: Although complete closure was the most frequent pattern, Y posterior chink was the second pattern in males (20.2%) and females (39.4%) in all phonation. The results revealed significant difference between males and females in glottic closure pattern (p=0.001). Moreover, significant differences were observed in habitual (p=0.004), high (p=0.006) and soft (p=0.02) phonations between males and females however, the differences in low (p=0.7) and loud (p=0.19) phonations between males and females were not significant.
Conclusion: Y posterior chink, as well as complete closure, are likely to be normal findings in people with normal voice. Besides, gender has a significant influence on glottic closure pattern.

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Background and Aim: Vocal cord nodule is one of the voice disorders causes hoarseness and breathy voice. Voice therapy is one of the treatment approaches. We aimed to find out the effects of voice therapy on vocal acoustic characteristics in these patients.
Methods: In this case series, five women with vocal nodule (14 to 45-year-old) participated in a 9-week voice therapy program developed by Boone. Vocal hygiene and voice practices were measured every day using a questionnaire. Moreover, structure and movements of vocal folds were examined using videolaryngostroboscope by a laryngologist before and after voice therapy to evaluate the effectiveness of program. For collecting voice samples we used sustained /æ/ in comfortable loudness for all patients and data were analyzed using Speech Studio.
Results: After voice therapy, fundamental frequency in four of five subjects were decreased but it was not significant (p=0.225). However, jitter in all of five subjects was significantly decreased (p=0.043). After voice therapy, shimmer in three of five subjects were decreased that was not significant (p=0.345).
Conclusion: Voice therapy can be used for the remedy of acoustic vocal characteristics and elimination or contraction of vocal cord nodule.

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Background and Aim: Internal evaluation is an important part of organization monitoring. One of the Ministry of Health&aposs policies is to encourage educational departments to conduct internal evaluations. The aim of internal evaluation of department of speech therapy was appraising its education, research and treatment qualities and determining its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTs) to identify the ways of overcoming weakness and threats.
Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 10 phases to evaluate 10 factors. Participants were undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students, academic staff, director of the department along with the patients. The internal evaluation software for educational and research centers released by Center of Medical Education Studies and Development was modified and utilized. Data was analyzed by calculating mean of means.
Results: Mean of means from highest to lowest scores were respectively as follows: the quality of diagnosis, treatment and dealing with patients 4.15 out of 5 as well as the quality of academic staff 3.5 were in the range of desirable category qualities of management and organizational structure 3.34, graduate students 3.21, teaching and learning processes 3.1, missions and goals 3.09, instructional methods and curriculum models 2.99, educational and research equipments 2.9, students 2.76 and research 2.67 were within the range of rather desirable category. Total score was 3.17 (63.4%) which was within the range of rather desirable category.
Conclusion: The department of speech therapy was in rather desirable state before merger. That result was appropriate according to the department&aposs conditions and supplies.

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Background and Aim: Oral stereognosis is the ability to recognize the objects placed in the mouth this plays a significant role in speech sounds production. Since the children with hearing loss have articulation disorders, this study aimed to clear the relation of hearing loss degrees and oral stereognosis in 5-year-old children.
Methods: In this cross-sectional non-invasive study, 40 children of 5-year-old (30 children with different degrees of hearing loss and 10 normal children) were involved. Oral steriognostic test was done for all of them and the Mann-Whitney U was used for statistical analysis.
Results: There were significant differences between the mean of oral stereognostic ability between the normal children and the children with severe (p<0.01) or profound hearing loss (p=0.05). There was no significant difference between the mean of oral stereognostic ability among the children with moderate, severe and profound hearing loss compared with together. Besides, there was no significant difference between the mean of the time of diagnosis among all of hearing loss and normal children.
Conclusion: The study shows that the children with moderate, severe and profound hearing loss have inefficient oral stereognosis in comparison with the normal children.

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Background and Aim: One of the common problems in many types of aphasia syndromes is word retrieval and/or production difficulty. So, designing a valid test that can examine this problem based on related processes and influencing factors is important. Picture confrontation naming is a typical method for assessing and treatment of word retrieval impairments. The aim of this study was determining the validity and reliability of oral picture-naming test in assessing word retrieval ability of aphasic adults.
Methods: Content and face validity of the test, that contains the line drawings of 115 Persian nouns, were assessed by speech therapists, graphists and painters. Then, the test was administered on 10 aphasics and 30 age-, gender- and education-matched normal subjects in two steps. Construct validity and internal consistency of test were investigated. External consistency was analyzed by test-retest method.
Results: The content and face validity of all items were more than 90 and 85 percents, respectively. There was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of patients and normal subjects (p<0.001). The internal consistency of 0.98 was determined for the test. The intra-class correlation coefficient of this test was 0.98.
Conclusions: The oral picture-naming test had good content, face and construct validity. Also, internal and external consistencies were high. So, this test is a valid instrument for assessing naming ability of aphasic patients by a variety and big set of picture.

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Background and Aim: Hearing-impairment leads to problems in language perception which in turn results in difficulties in language production. The present study investigated hearing-impaired children&aposs ability to discriminate Persian vowels. It aimed to describe the extent to which children have difficulty comprehending and discriminating phonetic features of vowels.
Methods: To fulfill this aim, a researcher-made test, which was based on the Auditory Perception Test 2001, investigated the phonetic discrimination of vowels in Persian-speaking and hearing-impaired children aged five to eight years. The test has two sections, auditory-visual and just auditory discrimination of vowels, which included five subtests assessing discrimination of front and back vowels. Through this test, the phonetic discrimination ability of 22 hearing-impaired children was evaluated. The gathered data were analyzed using matched t-test and repeated measures ANOVA.
Results: The findings showed that there is a significant difference between correct responses to the sections on front and back vowels (p<0.05). The audio-visual test showed that the /â/ vowel is easier to discriminate than other back vowels. Moreover, in the auditory test the /â/ vowel had the highest mean. The audio-visual test showed that the /i/ vowel is easier to discriminate than the other front vowels (/e/ /æ/). However, the discrimination of front vowels in the auditory test was the same.
Conclusion: The results revealed that back vowels were more easily discriminated than front vowels by hearing-impaired children.

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Background and Aim: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the central nervous system diseases can be associated with a variety of symptoms such as hearing disorders. The main consequence of hearing loss is poor speech perception, and temporal acuity has important role in speech perception. We evaluated the speech perception in silent and in the presence of noise and temporal acuity in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Methods: Eighteen adults with multiple sclerosis with the mean age of 37.28 years and 18 age- and sex- matched controls with the mean age of 38.00 years participated in this study. Temporal acuity and speech perception were evaluated by random gap detection test (GDT) and word recognition score (WRS) in three different signal to noise ratios.

Results: Statistical analysis of test results revealed significant differences between the two groups (p<0.05). Analysis of gap detection test (in 4 sensation levels) and word recognition score in both groups showed significant differences (p<0.001).

Conclusion: According to this survey, the ability of patients with multiple sclerosis to process temporal features of stimulus was impaired. It seems that, this impairment is important factor to decrease word recognition score and speech perception.