Background and Aim: prosody is a very important factor in communication and includes such parameters as: duration, intonation, pitch, stress, rhythm etc. Intonation is the pitch variation in one sentence. Duration is the time taken to utter a voice. The aim of the present study was to evaluate some parameters of prosody such as duration and intonation curve in interrogative sentences among normal Farsi speaking adults in order to determine the characteristics of this aspect of language with an emphasis on laboratory testing.
Methods: This study was performed as a cross-sectional one. The participants included 134 male and female Farsi speaking individuals aging between 18-30 years. In this study two interrogative sentences with open and closed answers were used. The voice samples were analyzed by Dr.speech -real analysis software. Data analysis incorporated unilateral analysis of variance and an intonation curve was drawn for each sentence.
Results: The parameter of duration among men and women was significantly different (p≤0.001). Duration in open questions was significantly longer than yes/no questions (p≤0.001). The intonation curve of the two groups were similar.
Conclusion: Men and women use duration changes, for making difference in prosody. On the whole, duration among women is longer than men. In open questions, the duration of sentences is mostly due to the question word. The intonation curve in open questions has more amplitude. Women show much more changes in basic frequency for transferring interrogative state in their expressions.

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: Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder with several speech disorders such as prosodic and pragmatic impairments. Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) based on Albert et al. model (1973) is a rehabilitation method, developed on prosodic features. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of MIT on Persian autistic children’s prosody.

Methods: An easy version of MIT, adopted for Persian language was designed by researchers. Then, after a successful pilot study on a 10-years-old boy for one month, 13 subjects were selected for the main study. All the subjects were autistic, male, right-handed, 7-10-years-old Persian children studied for 48 sessions (16 weeks). Background information gathered from the parents by a questionnaire. As pre- and post-test, some assessments about children’s fundamental frequency (Fº) and intensity of the Persian vowel sounds and declarative and interrogative sentences were accomplished. The data analysis was done using Praat and SPSS softwares.

Results: There was a statistically significant increase in acoustic features, such as intensity, and fundamental frequency of declarative and interrogative sentences also all six vowels of Persian, excluding /â/ and /æ/ (p<0.05 for all).

Conclusion: The widely reported unusual prosody in autistic children was quantified by this study, too. In addition, there was convincing evidence of the positive effects of melodic intonation therapy on acoustic features in Persian autistic children.