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: Cued speech as a kind of communication method, is a system which utilizes several hand configurations and locations to supplement the normal visible manifestations of speech. This study was aimed to investigate the effects of Persian cued speech on the speech discrimination scores of hearing impaired children.
Methods: Sixteen 9-12 years old profoundly hearing impaired children were divided into two matched-groups of cases and controls. Cases were taught cued speech in a five-month period of 45-60 minutes daily therapy. Speech discrimination score test was tested pretest, post-test and three-week follow-up test in both groups. Mixed repeated measurement was used to analyze the repeated measures data.
Results: There was a significant difference between pretest (without cued speech) and the other two tests of post-test and follow-up (both with cued speech) in cases. The speech perception scores of the cases were almost completed (p=0.001) after cued speech practicing but no significant difference was seen in speech perception scores of control group.(p>0.05)
Conclusion: The results indicate that Persian cued speech is an efficient tool to increase speech discrimination scores of hearing impaired children.

Background and Aim: The birth of a hearing-impaired child and raising him/her often brings special psychological feelings for parents, especially mothers who spend more time with the child. This study aimed to compare the general health status in mothers of hearing-impaired and hearing children.

Methods: This was a descriptive-analytic study. General Health Questionnaire was used to identify general health status and data were analyzed with independent-t test.

Results: The general health level of mothers of hearing-impaired children was lower than mothers of normal hearing children (p=0.01 ). The average scores of anxiety (p=0.01), depression (p= 0.01) and physical (p=0.02) symptoms and social function (p=0.01) of mothers of hearing-impaired children was higher than mothers of normal hearing ones (p=0.01).

Conclusion: Having a child with hearing impairment affects mothers’ general health status. Our findings show that it’s necessary to provide psychological and social support for mothers of hearing-impaired children.