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Background and Aim: Children with speech and language disorders have a reduced diadochokinesis rates.. The purpose of this study was to compare the oral diadochokinesis with rate of speech and reading in normal students.
Materials and Methods: One hundred of fifth grade female students were participated in this descriptive - comparative study. All subjects were native speakers of persion who passed an informal screening test of articulation and speech. None of subjects had a history of speech, hearing, behavioral and neurological disorders. The subjects were asked to read a text of their book, tell a story and perform some oral diadochokinesis tasks (flecher`s criterion).The time was measured by Cool Edit. Descriptive statistics and compared t-test were used for analysis .
Results : the syllable / tâ /had the highest rate of diadochokinesis , while the syllables /pa/ and / kâ/ were in the next orders ( 3.96,4.01, 4.52).The rate of reading was higher than the rate of talking. There was a significant relationship between the reading rate and diadochokinesis in / kâ / (P=0.02) and / pâtâkâ / (P=0.02)
Conclusion: the results indicate that there is no relation between the rate of speech and diadochokinesis but there is a significant relation between Reading rate and diadochokinesis in some tasks..

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Background and Aim: Measures of oral diadochokinesis are widely used in the assessment and detecting motor speech disorders and functional abnormalities of speech performance. Preschoolers have great difficulties with this clinical task. One reason for this problem is application of using of non-words in the test. Since, such words were not designed in Farsi; therefore we compared some words and non-words repetitive articulatory rate in preschool children.

Materials and Methods: In this analytic cross-sectional study design, 142 children (65 boys & 77 girls) aged 4 to 6 years old were participated. We compared timing for 10 fast repetitions between two meaningful words /motækΛ, golΛbi/ and tri-syllabic sequences /pΛtΛkΛ/. Data was analyzed by repeated measures of ANOVA test.

Results: In children aged 4 to 5 years old, mean ± SD of timing for 10 repetitions of /pΛtΛkΛ, motækΛ, golΛbi/ were 7.72±1.02, 6.58±1.68 & 6.65±1.13 seconds respectively, and in children aged 5 to 6 years, were 7.57±0.95, 6.35±1.38 & 6.30±1.01 seconds respectively. This Analysis showed that regardless of all factors, the main effect of type of words on oral diadochokinesis was significant (p=0.0001). There were no other significant main effects or interactions.

Conclusion: Children aged 4 to 6 years old could repeat meaningful words /motækΛ, golΛbi/ faster than non-word /pΛtΛkΛ/. Sex and age group factors had not significant effect on oral diadochokinesis function. Finally, it is suggested that speech therapists can examine this ability with meaningful words.

Keywords: Oral diadochokinesis, Word, Non-word