Background and Aim: Hearing impaired children encounter many problems for learning language and communication skills. The aim of this research is to compare morphological skills in conversational speech and story retelling of hearing impaired with typically normal children.

Materials and Methods: In this cross sectional analytic research 16 typically normal and 9 hearing impaired children between 48 to 72 months were selected in a convenience sampling method .After considering inclusion and exclusion criteria, linguistic sampling for conversational and story retelling data was gathered. Parametric, nonparametric statistical analysis and U Mann-Whitney and t- test was performed on gathered data.

Results: In story retelling there was significant difference between using conjunction,whole free grammatical morphemes, clitics, zero morphemes (p˂0.05). There were significant differences between using conjunction, proposition, conversational grammatical morphemes, inflectional affixes, clitics zero morphemes and whole bound grammatical morphemes in conversational speech (p˂0.05).

Conclusions: Hearing impaired children have more morphological errors than typically normal children. They tend to omit lexical morpheme in story retelling, but typically normal children tend to substitute a lexical morpheme with another one in story retelling. The most kind of error in both groups was omission of morpheme in conversational speech.

Keywords: Hearing impaired children, Morphological errors, Conversational and Story retelling

Background and Aim: The purpose of the present research is to investigate the relationship between syntactic complexity (in terms of sentence and clause structure) on the stuttering occurrence in pre-school Persian speaking children who stutter (CWS).

Materials and Methods: The present cross-sectional study was carried out on 15 monolingual CWS (12 boys and 3 girls) ranging in age from 4 to 6 years old in Mashhad. The convenience sampling method was used to collect data. The 30 minute spontaneous speech samples were recorded in a quiet room in speech therapy clinic while the child was speaking with the speech therapist or the parent (mother or father). The 60 numbers of the utterances produced by CWS were transcribed and then a paired T-test was used to analyze the data.

Results: The results showed significant differences between fluent and non-fluent utterances in terms of syntactic complexity of sentence and clause structure. The results indicated that at clausal level, by increasing the verb arguments in both the main and subordinate clauses, the stuttering occurrence was significantly increased (P<0.01). Moreover, the stuttering occurrence was higher among the compound sentences compared to the simple ones (P<0.01).

Conclusion: The research findings denoted that there was a meaningful relationship between the syntactic complexity based on sentence and clause structure and the stuttering occurrence in Persian CWS.

Keywords: Syntactic complexity, Sentence, Clause, Verb argument, Stuttering