---

Background and Aim: Hearing impairment affects all aspect of individual life, specially language and communication skills. When hearing impairment is congenital or occurs early in life, the child's ability to learn optimally through audition, will be affected. The aim of this study was to evaluate linguistic skills of preschool hearing impaired children and compare these skills with normal peers.

Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed on 38 preschool hearing impaired children that the main handicap was severe to profound hearing loss with ability to communicate orally and 28 normal children with the same cultural and social context. Twenty four non linguistic variables including age, gender, the age of entrance of preschool center, number of hearing aids, etc. were obtained by filling a questionnaire and fifteen linguistics variables including number of utterance, morphemes, correct utterance, noun phrase, ambiguous utterance, correct sentences, compound sentences, etc. were collected by some part of TOLD-P-3 test and three complementary questions. Then we compared the data from two groups.

Results: There were significant differences between number of utterance, number of correct mean length utterance, number of well-formed sentences in normal and hearing impaired group (p<0.000). There were no significant difference between unintelligible utterances, repetitive utterances and bad-formed sentences between two groups(p>0.05).

Conclusion: This study showed a severe deficit in linguistic skills in preschool hearing impaired children.

---

Background and Aim: Phonological processing skills include the abilities to restore, retrieve and use memorized phonological codes. The purpose of this research is to compare and evaluate phonological processing skills in 6-7 year old blind and sighted Persian speakers in Tehran, Iran.
Methods: This research is an analysis-comparison study. The subjects were 24 blind and 24 sighted children. The evaluation test of reading and writing disorders in primary school students, linguistic and cognitive abilities test, and the naming subtest of the aphasia evaluation test were used as research tools.
Results: Sighted children were found to perform better on phoneme recognition of nonwords and flower naming subtests and the difference was significant (p<0.001). Blind children performed better in words and sentence memory the difference was significant (p<0.001). There were no significant differences in other subtests.
Conclusion: Blind children&aposs better performance in memory tasks is due to the fact that they have powerful auditory memory.

---

Background and Aim: An imbalance between phonatory subsystems may lead to disturbing phonatory muscular balance and consequently voice disorders. Based on theoretical issues, criterion-based laryngeal manual therapy, as a novel treatment method which is supported by classical laryngeal manual therapy, can improve voice quality using manual maneuvers combined with phonatory tasks. The present study aimed to report the treating effects of this method on hyperfunctional voice disorders.

Methods: Twenty adult participants with hyperfunctional voice disorders by the least three months history of voice disorder were selected. The participant’s voices were assessed multidimensionally using acoustic, audio-pecreptual and stroboscopic assessments before and after treatment.

Results: There were a decrease in jitter (p=0.003) and shimmer (p<0.001) and also, increase in harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR) (p<0.001) of vowel /a/ after treatment. Besides, there was an increase in harmony to noise ratio (p=0.009) and decrease in jitter (p=0.020) of vowel /i/, too. There were not significant changes in shimmer amount of vowel /i/ (p=0.170) after treatment. There were highly significant changes in all aspects of audio-perceptual (p<0.001) and videostroboscopic (p<0.001) parameters.

Conclusion: Using voice-based laryngeal manual therapy can be a treatment method in handling hyperfunctional voice disorders.

---

Background and Aim: Several studies have demonstrated deficits in rapid naming in dyslexic readers however the extent of deficit is different in various orthographies. This study was intended to survey the naming speed in Persian children with dyslexia.

Methods: Rapid automatized naming (RAN) task of 19 children with dyslexia were compared with 31 nondyslexic children. Participants were selected from the students of the second grade of primary schools in Tehran city, Iran, with normal intelligence [intelligence quotient]. Nondyslexic children were at the age of 7.7 to 8.7 years (mean=7.6) and dyslexics were 7.8 to 9.4 years old (mean=8.1). Reading accuracy and speed were assessed by text reading (Diagnostic Reading Test), and high frequency word, low frequency word and nonword reading (Reading and Dyslexia Test).

Results: Dyslexic readers needed more time than non-dyslexics when naming objects (p<0.001), numbers (p=0.001) and letters (p<0.001). The mean of dyslexics z-scores were -1.98 on objects, -1.96 on numbers and -3.35 on letters. 42% of dyslexics did not show any deficit on rapid automatized naming task. All of the subtests were correlated to reading speed (p<0.050), but among subtests of rapid automatized naming task, only letter naming was correlated to reading accuracy (p<0.050).

Conclusion: More than half of dyslexics cases showed an apparent deficit in naming speed (objects, numbers and letters), which was more evident at letters. Naming speed was related to reading accuracy and reading speed although the relationship was stronger with the second one.

---

Background and Aim: The language sample analysis (LSA) is more common in other languages than Persian to study language development and assess language pathology. We studied some psychometric properties of language sample analysis in this research such as content validity of written story and its pictures, test-retest reliability, and inter-rater reliability.

Methods: We wrote a story based on Persian culture from Schneider’s study. The validity of written story and drawn pictures was approved by experts. To study test-retest reliability, 30 children looked at the pictures and told their own story twice with 7-10 days interval. Children generated the story themselves and tester did not give any cue about the story. Their audio-taped story was transcribed and analyzed. Sentence and word structures were detected in the analysis.

Results: Mean of experts' agreement with the validity of written story was 92.28 percent. Experts scored the quality of pictures high and excellent. There was correlation between variables in sentence and word structure (p<0.05) in test-retest, except complex sentences (p=0.137). The agreement rate was 97.1 percent in inter-rater reliability assessment of transcription. The results of inter-rater reliability of language analysis showed that correlation coefficients were significant.

Conclusion: The results confirmed that the tool was valid for eliciting language sample. The consistency of language performance in repeated measurement varied from mild to high in language sample analysis approach.