Background and Aim: The words are the symbolic tools for communication. Nouns are the initial and the most frequent components of language that children acquire and use during the procedure of language development. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the noun perception and expression abilities in Persian-speaking children, as well as gathering the normative data for two picture-pointing and picture-naming tests.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 110 normal Persian-speaking children (54 girls and 56 boys), 2.5 to 4 year-old in four groups, were selected randomly throughout Arak kindergartens. Two pictorial perception and expression tests were performed in this study.
Results: Mean scores of perception and expression was statistically different between all age groups, except 3 and 3.5 year-old groups (p<0.05). There was no statistically difference between mean scores of girls and boys. In addition, a significant positive correlation between mean scores of perception and expression was shown (p=0.001, r=0.896).
Conclusion: The perception and expression abilities are different in 4 age groups. The two picture-pointing and picture-naming tests can show these differences. Regardless of rapid development of perception, perception and expression abilities develop in parallel, and the ability of girls and boys shows similar trends.

Background and Aim: Due to defects of auditory feedback, children with hearing loss have inappropriate speech intonation. Consistently, results of previous studies have shown that cochlear-implanted children have some difficulties in their intonation. Intonation shows the type of the sentence which can be statement or question sentences. The purpose of this study was comparison of speech intonation in cochlear-implanted children and normal hearing children.
Methods: The present study was performed on 25 cochlear-implanted children and 50 normal hearing children. Different pictures were shown to the subjects and they said statement and question sentences. All sentences were heard by eight speech therapists and perceptually judged. Using praat software mean base frequency and pitch alterations were measured.
Results: In cochlear-implanted group, mean speech base frequency was higher and mean pitch alteration was lower than the control group. Mean experts&apos scores in cochlear-implanted group were lower than the control group. Differences in all three variables were statistically significant (p<0.05). There was a significant direct correlation between duration of time that the children had cochlear implant and perceptual judgment scores (p<0.05).
Conclusion: According to the results, cochlear implant prosthesis has limited efficacy in improving speech intonation although their ability to produce speech intonation improves by increasing duration of the time that children have cochlear implant. Thus speech therapists should consider intervening on speech intonation in treatment program of cochlear-implanted children.

Background and Aim: Studies have shown that most children before age 4 are able to comprehend and express wh-question. In the Persian language, a case study has confirmed these results. The aim of this study is to evaluate the ability of 4-6 year olds to comprehend and express wh-question.
Methods: Seventy two 4-6 year-old Persian-speaking children were selected randomly. Wh-words consist of: what, where, who, why, and when. In the part of comprehension subjects answered questions about two pictures, and in the part of expression they asked questions elicited by a speaking puppet about four pictures. Descriptive analysis and student&aposs t-test were used for data analysis.
Results: In comprehension 4-6 year-old children gained the complete score (2) with SD=0 in all wh-words. However, 4-5 year old children gained the score of 1.89 with SD of 0.32 for the word when. In expression, independent t-test showed the maximum score of 3.52 with SD of 0.84 related to questions with who. 5-6 and 4-5 year old subjects had significant differences in questions with what (p=0.005), where (p=0.003), who (p=0.012), and when (p<0.001). Most errors were expressed in question with when.
Conclusion: Subjects of this study had the ability to comprehend and express wh-words. Comprehension of wh-words is easy for 4-6 year-old children they are able to use them in questions, but have some application errors.

Background and Aim: Various studies indicate that deaf children compared with hearing children have problems in all aspects of emotional development, including facial expression, emotional understanding of display rules, mixed and contradictory emotions and theory of mind. This article reviews studies of impaired emotional development in children with hearing impairment.

Recent Findings: Some findings indicate that young deaf children function similar to hearing children. The difficulty in understanding display rules experienced by deaf children can be explained by appealing to their inability to adequately express emotions in emotion-eliciting contexts, as opposed to their difficulty in understanding mental states. Overall, research findings indicate that emotional understanding in various aspects and dimensions is associated with children's language abilities.

Conclusion: Results obtained show that more aspects of deaf children 's emotional development (such as interpretation and recognition of facial expression) are similar to that of their peers. However, deaf children performed more poorly in tasks which required experience in understanding display rules and theory of mind . Recent findings generally demonstrate that language plays an important role in the emotional development of children. Therefore, deaf children in comparison to hearing children are less able performers.