Objective: To determine phonological processing in elemantery children with Down syndrome

Materials and Methods: Phonetic test is used to extract phonological processing in 40 child with Down syndrome .They were normal in hearing and oral structure.
Results: There was significant difference between girls and boys in some subgroups of phonological processing. In assimilation, voiceless assimilation in boys and complete assimilation in girls were the most. Nasal assimilation in girls and fricative assimilation in boys were the least. In substitution, the least mean belonged to liquid and nasal substitution in girls and voice ness substitution in boys. In general there was no significant difference between age and phonological awareness however, there was direct correlation between syllable structure and age and reverse correlation between age and stop assimilation.
Conclusion: In addition to 3 groups of phonological processing including: syllable structure, assimilation, and substitution, omission was seen. The difference between girls and boys indicates they are impressed by the phonetic structure of words in different ways. Correlation between age and phonological processing shows phonological errors may be resulted from deviation.

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: Speech and language pathologists (SLP) often refer to phonological data as part of their assessment protocols in evaluating the communication skills of children. The aim of this study was to develop the Persian version of the phonological test in evaluating and diagnosing communication skills in Persian speaking children and to evaluate its validity and reliability.

Methods: The Persian phonological test (PPT) was conducted on 387 monolingual Persian speaking boys and girls (3-6 years of age) who were selected from 12 nurseries in the northwest region of Tehran. Content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) were assessed by speechtherapists and linguists. Correlation between speech and language pathologists experts' opinions and Persian phonological test results in children with and without phonological disorders was evaluated to investigate the Persian phonological test validity. In addition, the Persian phonological test test-retest reliability was investigated.

Results: Both content validity ratio and content validity index were found to be acceptable (CVR≥94.71 and CVI=97.35). The PPT validity was confirmed by finding a good correlation between s peech and language pathologists experts' opinions and Persian phonological test results ( r _Kappa =0.73 and r _Spearman =0.76). The percent of agreement between transcription and analyzing error patterns in test-retest (ranging from 86.27%-100%) and score-rescore (ranging from 94.28%-100%) showed that Persian phonological test had a very high reliability.

Conclusion: The results of this study show that the Persian phonological test seems to be a suitable tool in evaluating phonological skills of Persian speaking children in clinical settings and research projects.

Background and Aim: Some children with speech sound disorder (SSD) have difficulty with phonological awareness skills therefore, the purpose of this study was to survey the correlation between phonological processes and phonological awareness.

Methods: Twenty-one children with speech sound disorder, aged between 5 and 6, participated in this cross-sectional study. They were recruited from speech therapy clinics at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. They were selected using the convenience sampling method . Language, speech sound, and phonological awareness skills were investigated by the test of language development-third edition (TOLD-3), the Persian diagnostic evaluation articulation and phonology test, and the phonological awareness test. Both Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlations were used to analyze the data.

Results: There was a significant correlation between the atypical phonological processes and alliteration awareness (p=0.005), rhyme awareness (p=0.009), blending phonemes (p=0.006), identification of words with the same initial phoneme (p=0.007), and identification of words with the same final phoneme (p=0.007). Analyzing the correlation on the basis of the phoneme and syllable structure separately showed there was a significant correlation between the atypical phoneme structure and alliteration awareness (p=0.001), rhyme awareness (p=0.008), blending phonemes (p=0.029), identification of words with the same initial phoneme (p=0.007), and identification of words with the same final phoneme (p=0.003).

Conclusion: Results revealed a relationship between phonological processes and phonological awareness in children with speech sound disorder. Poor phonological awareness was associated with atypical phonological processes especially at the phoneme level.