Background and Aim: The communication process includes both verbal and nonverbal elements. Nonverbal behavior or body language includes facial expression, eye contact, posture and prosody. Prosody conveys semantic or affective information to a listener. Nonetheless, so far in Iran no report on assessment of speech prosody comprehension in patients has ever been published. The aim of this study was to measure the validity and reliability of the prosody comprehension test specifically designed for the Persian language and culture.
Methods: This study is a type of test development. 73 sentences were orated by 22 professional vocalists in eight different prosodies. A total of 6582 voices were prepared which were listened by 200, 18-30 year-old students and a voice specialist. Having the content validity calculated for all voices, 1473 voices were found to be unanimously agreed upon by all participants in terms of emotional status which were analyzed by a voice specialist. Eventually, 169 voices were selected for developing the prosody comprehension test including the following four subtests: none motional prosody discrimination, emotional discrimination, naming of prosody and naming conflicts. Reliability of the test was determined by performing the test on 32, 18-60 year-old normal people.
Results: The designed test of comprehension prosody had 100% content validity ratio and 94% reliability and the correlation of test of prosody was 89% (p=0.001).
Conclusion: This test in Persian language has appropriate validity and reliability and is appropriate for assessment of prosody comprehension.

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: 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.