Background and Aim: The short-term memory (STM) has been studied to a great extent so far. Using some strategies and techniques to help the subject to access to his/her memory is important for Speech pathologist. Priming is a process that increases the chance of accessing to some information of memory by means of some simulations. So, primings are some words which facilitate the retrieval of the target words. The purpose of this study is comparing phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span.
Materials and Methods: The research was conducted on sixty-four 18-25 year-old male students in Tehran University of Medical sciences. Due to some distortion factors, including bilingualism, stutter-ing, and articulation problem, that can effect the reaction time, were determined as exclusion critenia. In additiion, subjects with difficulty in Wepman auditory discrimination were ruled out. The test was performed via the second version of programmed DMDX software and reaction time was recorded.
Results: Semantic tasks and rhyming tasks were retrieved faster than the other tasks in lexical access respectively. There was a significant difference between the semantic and rime tasks but there is no significant difference between alliteration and unrelated tasks.
Conclusion: The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than the other levels and the phonological level is activated right after that. The alliteration level is the last level that activated. It has some similarities with some other investigations on the reaction time in phono-logical tasks

Background and Aim: Fluent aphasia and Alzheimer patients have difficulties in perception and naming. Patient with fluent Aphasia and Alzheimer disease, both have difficulty in perception and naming. Their site of lesion is also identical, that is temporoparietal lobe which is damaged in both group. This study investigates the effects of semantic and phonological cues in facilitation of word finding.
Materials and Methods: The study was prescriptive - analytic cross-sectional with 14 patients. The participants were seven fluent aphasia with mean age 48.4 year old and seven Alzheimer patients with mean age 69/71 year old and mean Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) 16 score. Those were assessed with Persian Naming Test. The Aphasic patients were selected from Tehran University hospitals and Alzheimer ones were from Rouzbeh hospital and Alzheimer Association of Iran.
Results: Mean semantic and phonological cues in fluent aphasia patients were 2.71 and 12.29, respectively, which significantly different (p=0.01), but those results were 8.29 and 3.43 in Alzheimer patients, that were not significantly different (p>0.05). A main result of this study was significant difference between two cues in both groups.
Conclusion: Two groups of patients use two cues in word finding. The correct responses increase with phonological cue in fluent aphasia but semantic cue has the main role for naming in Alzheimer patients.

Background and Aim: Understanding and defining developmental norms of auditory comprehension is a necessity for detecting auditory-verbal comprehension impairments in children. We hereby investigated lexical auditory development of Persian (Farsi) speaking children.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, auditory comprehension of four 2-5 year old normal children of adult&aposs child-directed utterance at available nurseries was observed by researchers primarily to gain a great number of comprehendible words for the children of the same age. The words were classified into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Auditory-verbal comprehension task items were also considered in 2 sections of subordinates and superordinates auditory comprehension. Colored pictures were provided for each item. Thirty 2-5 year old normal children were randomly selected from nurseries all over Tehran. Children were tested by this task and subsequently, mean of their correct response were analyzed.
Results: The findings revealed that there is a high positive correlation between auditory-verbal comprehension and age (r=0.804, p=0.001). Comparing children in 3 age groups of 2-3, 3-4 and 4-5 year old, showed that subordinate and superordinate auditory comprehension of the former group is significantly lower (p<0.05) than the others . Intra-group comparisons revealed no significant difference between nouns, verbs and adjectives (p>0.05), while the difference between subordinate and superordinate auditory comprehension was significant in all age groups (p<0.05).
Conclusion: Auditory-verbal comprehension develop much faster at lower than older ages and there is no prominent difference between word linguistic classes including nouns, verbs and adjectives. Slower development of superordinate auditory comprehension implies semantic hierarchical evolution of words.

Background and Aim: Children with severe and profound hearing loss have difficulties in communicating with others and educating at school. Effects of learning environment on children&aposs language skills have been recently focused and educating those students in ordinary schools has been proposed. According to this view, we compared perception of antonyms and synonyms as a semantic aspect of language in students of ordinary, integrated and special schools.
Methods: It was an analytic cross-sectional study. Three groups of students were enrolled: normal-hearing students of ordinary schools and hearing-loss students of integrated and specials schools. Each group consisted of 25 students in fifth grade of elementary schools in Tehran city. Two written tests were used. Subjects wrote synonyms and antonyms for each word in the tests.
Results: Results denoted significant differences between scores of normal-hearing and hearing-loss students and also between hearing-loss students of integrated schools and hearing-loss students of special schools (p<0.05). In all three groups of the students, perception of antonyms was better than antonyms (p<0.001). Speech processing rate in normal-hearing students were higher than both groups of hearing-loss students (p<0.001).
Conclusion: The differences between normal-hearing and hearing-loss students shows that similar to other language skills, perception of synonyms and antonyms as a semantic aspect of speech is related to the hearing conditions and type of education. Moreover, the differences between two groups of hearing-loss students represent that speech stimulants and interaction with normal-hearing children could improve semantic aspect of speech in hearing-loss students.

Background: Hyperlexia is a super ability demonstrated by a very specific group of individuals with developmental disorders. This term is used to describe the children with high ability in word recognition, but low reading comprehension skills, despite the problems in language, cognitive and social skills. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of improving the semantic aspect of language (increase in understanding and expression vocabulary) on reading comprehension in an autistic child with hyperlexia.
Case: The child studied in this research was an autistic child with hyperlexia. At the beginning of this study he was 3 years and 11 months old. He could read, but his reading comprehension was low. In a period of 12 therapy session, understanding and expression of 160 words was taught to child. During this period, the written form of words was eliminated. After these sessions, the reading comprehension was re-assessed for the words that child could understand and express.
Conclusion: Improving semantic aspect of language (understanding and expression of vocabulary) increase reading comprehension of written words.

Background and Aim: Impairment in language content production, long-term memory and executive function in Parkinson's disease reported in several studies. Identification of these disorders is useful in planning for early interventions. The aim of this study was evaluation of semantic and phonemic clustering and switching in Parkinson's disease.

Methods: In this study, 30 patients with Parkinson's disease and 30 healthy individuals evaluated that were matched by age , sex and educational level . Clustering and switching average were compared between the two groups according to the Troyer method . Data recorded and analyzed using independent t test and Pearson correlation coefficient.

Results: Comparison of mean scores of clustering between patients with Parkinson's disease and healthy individuals indicated significant difference (p=0.05). In addition, significant difference was observed between mean score of switching in two groups (p=0.008).

Conclusion: The finding of the present study reveal that switching between semantic or phonemic subcategory and clustering impaired in patients with Parkinson's disease.