---

Background and aim: Intonation perception mainly relies on fundamental frequency changes perception that is not available for individual with profound to severe hearing loss. The aim of the present study is to investigate the perception of intonation in cochlear implanted children and compare with normal hearing children.

 Materials and methods: This study has been carried out on 25 cochlear implanted children and 50 children with normal hearing. An adult who her first language was Persian, expressed some questions and statement sentences. These sentences were playing for child and was asked him/her to determine whether it was in a question form or statement one.   

 Results: The results showed that perception of question and statement sentences intonation had significantly differences between two groups (P<0.05). Perception of question and statement sentences intonation had significantly correlation with age at implantation and duration of implant use (P<0.05).

 Conclusion: According to the findings of the current study and previous studies, cochlear implant has some deficits in facilitating the perception of intonation. However, this limitation has been compensated partly for early surgery. Thus, speech language pathologists should consider intervention of intonation in treatment program of cochlear implanted children.  

---

Background and Aim:Set-shifting that is one of the most important executive functions in learning tasks and intelligence Quality (IQ) reactions was studied in high functioning children with autism. Mental ability can play an important role in learning tasks and activities of daily living. Assessment of this component is important in rehabilitation programs. The aim of this study is to compare set-shifting in high functoning children with autism and normal subjects between 6 to 12 years old. 

Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 30 children between 6 to 12 years old were participated and divided in two groups randomly. The mean age of autism and normal groups was 7.86(1.38) and 8(1.68) respectively. Cambridge neuropsychological test automated battery and wechsler for children were used. Data were analyzed by t-test.

Results: High functioning children with autism showed significant differences in set-shifting in comparison with normal subjects particulary in extradimensional stages (stages 8 and 9).

Conclusion: High functioning children with autism have poor capability in set-shifting in comparison with normal subjects. 

---

Background and Aim: Intonation has important roles on increase in intelligibility and conveyance correct meaning especially in conversational speech. Recognition of intonation correlates with three acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency, intensity and duration. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the acoustic correlation of intonation and intelligibility of speech in children with cochlear implant (CI) and compare with normal hearing (NH) children. 

Materials and Methods: This study has been carried out on 25 cochlear implant children and 25 children with normal hearing in primary school age ranges.Ten pictures were shown to children and statement and question sentences were elicited from them. To investigation of intelligibility, produced sentences were perceptually judgment by seven speech therapists and were scored by five point rating value. Acoustic correlationwere determined using Praat software.    

Results: The results showed that there were significantly difference between two groups in each of acoustic correlations (P<0.05). Intelligibility scores of CI children were significantly lower than ones of NH children (P<0.05). There were significantly correlation between intonation and intelligibility scores, also between intelligibility and duration of implant use (P<0.05).

Conclusion: According to the findings of the present study, cochlear implant children's performance in using of acoustic correlation of intonation is lower than normal hearing peers that results in inappropriately intonation. Inappropriately intonation can be the cause of low intelligibility in cochlear implant children. Thus, intervention of intonation should be considered in treatment program of cochlear implant children.   

---

  Background and Aim: Hearing impairment in critical period of speech and language development is caused defects in oral and written language. The aim of this study is to use a test for comparing the reading skills of elementary fifth grade hearing and moderately severe hearing loss students in public schools.
Materials and Methods: In this cross sectional study, 10 hearing impaired children selected from the total number of fifth grade moderately severe hearing loss students' community (public schools) based on the inclusion criteria and compared with 10 hearing children that were matched according to grade, as a control group. In order to gather the data, reading and writing tests for school students was used. Data analysis was done through SPSS-16.
Results: The findings indicated that hearing impaired children on auditory discrimination skills (P=0.001), word auditory memory (P=0.034) sentence auditory memory (P<0.001), phonological blending (P=0.034), phonological segmentation (P=0.012) and text reading comprehension (P=0.044) were significantly weaker than the control group, but they had similar function in other skills.
Conclusion: Children with hearing impairment have the same function in tasks based on visual processing to normal children, whereas, in tasks based on auditory and phonological processing are weaker than them. Keywords: Reading skills, Hearing loss children, Public schools

---

Abstract

Background and Aim: The human needs speech for making relationship, he achieves speech with linguistic structure including sound, word and more important than other the sentence. In Persian grammar, there are different types of sentences including: imperative, question, active, passive, exclamation. A childe makes sentence with single-word, telegraphic speech and then with composing names and verbs and propositions in his stage of growing and finally he expresses the passive, conditional, compound sentences. Because of no previous study has been done about the age of comprehension passive sentences in Persian language so we decided to run the comprehension passive sentences on normal children. And we got the age of growth about it in normal children then we compared it in hearing impaired children. The aim of this study was to compare for comprehension passive sentences in normal children 3 to8 years old with hearing impaired children 8years old.

Materials and Methods: A total of 691 normal children 3 to 8 years old in central Tehran and 18 hearing impaired children in special schools participated in this test. At first the test was conducted on 30 children, and proved its reliability. This test had 15sets of three pictures and child must show one of those three pictures. At first, two sets of three pictures were performed to child as example and practice then the passive sentence was expressed about it Colloquial and child must show it and if he/she couldn’t ,the examiner showed the correct picture and showed next picture as be offered to children should be familiar with the test. The child was described that he/she looked at pictures carefully and showed the correct picture after reviewing all the pictures. In continue, 15 pictures of this test were executes and examiner recorded the results.

Results: The highest number of correct responses were for normal children 8years old (Average: 13.93) and other records were in order for children 7 years old (Average: 12.51), 6 years old (Average: 9.37), 5 years old (Average: 8.09), 4 yeas old (Average: 5.31), 3 years old (Average: 3.61) and the lowest record of correct responses was for the hearing impaired children. The result of this study showed that there is a significant relationship among the ability of comprehension passive sentences and age, birth order, parents education (p<0.05) but there is no significant relationship between ability of comprehension passive sentences and their gender (p>0.05) and there is a significant deference between the average of percentage of responses and comprehension passive sentences in hearing impaired children in all the range of ages except 3 years old (p=1.000). It means that hearing impaired children in comprehension passive sentences are similar to children 3 years old.

Conclusion: The result of this study showed there is a significant relationship among the ability of comprehension passive sentences and age, birth order, parents education but there is no significant relationship between ability of comprehension passive sentences and their gender. The results of this study showed the ability of comprehension passive sentences in hearing impaired children 8 years old is like normal children 3 years old too.

Keywords: Passive sentences, Comprehension, Normal children, Severe hearing loss, The Persian language

---

Background and Aim: Memory and learning specially auditory-verbal learning affected on developed and forming the cognitive skills in children. The auditory- verbal learning assessed with several methods. The Rey auditory verbal learning test is a useful tool for the assessment of auditory verbal learning. The Persian version of Rey test is not used for assessment auditory-verbal learning in Persian language children. The aim of the present study was to assess the auditory verbal memory and learning performance of 9 to 11 year old healthy children using the Persian version of rey auditory-verbal learning test and comparing these data with children from other countries.

  

Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was done on 86 healthy children with age ranging from 9 to 11. Different aspects of memory like immediate recall, delayed recall, recognition, forgetting rate, interference and learning were assessed using the Persian version of Rey auditory-verbal learning test.

  

Results: It was observed a significant correlation between the scores on the first trial to fifth trial. The mean scores of the participation increased from 7.34 on the first trial to 13.93 on the fifth trial. The correct answer was more in girls than the boys. There was not significant correlation between immediate and delayed recall. There was significant correlation between delayed recall and recognition. The proactive and retroactive interference and forgetting rate scores were 0.97, 0.87 and 0.37 respectively.

  

Conclusion: The Persian version of Rey test in the clinical setting is a useful tool for assessment of memory and auditory-verbal learning. The scores increased from first trial to fifth trial show learning effect in Persian language children. The auditory verbal memory and learning performance of Persian language children in Persian version of Rey test was compared to the performance of the same population in other countries.

  

Key Words: Memory, Children, Rey auditory verbal learning.

---

Background and Aim : Language disorders are one of the most prominent features seen in autistic children. The present study intends to investigate some linguistic features of speech in Persian-speaking children with autism in comparison with their typically developing age mates.

 

Materials and Methods : By recording the speech of 20 autistic girls and boys who were seven to eleven years old, phonetic, phonologic, morphologic and syntactic features of their speech were compared with those of their typically developing age-mates. The SPSS (18) and Exact Fischer Test were used to analyze the collected data.

 

Results : The results showed that consonant deletion, substitution of phonemes, using stress on inappropriate syllable, atypical intonation, incorrect use of tense, incorrect use or not using prepositions, problems in making the nouns plural and not using complex sentences were significantly different in children with autism and typically developing children (p<0.05), while epenthesis, metathesis, violating subject-verb agreement, having difficulty with making the verbs negative, and using demonstratives were not significantly different (p>0.05).

  

Conclusion : Children with autism had more problems in phonetic, phonologic, morphologic and syntactic features of speech in comparison with their typically developing age-mates. Therefore, withappropriate treatment programs, these problems could be reduced.

 

Key Words : Autistic children, Typically developing children, Phonetic and phonologic features, Morphologic and syntactic features

---

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: Perception of words is one of the parameters that examine to assess the language skills, due to lack of appropriate test in this field, informal assessing was done and evaluating of Perception of words has been challenged. The aim of this study is to design and determine the characteristics of Picture perceptive Objective Vocabulary Test for normal Persian-speaking 6-13 years-old children in order to examine the perception of words accurately.

Materials and Methods: In this methodological study that was done cross-sectional, a list of words that had the ability to visualize, prepared. To determine the content validity index, 7 speech therapists were surveyed and were chosen 240 images of words, finally this test was done on 118 children (57 girls, 61 boys) in seven age groups. Reliability of this test was assessed by repeatability and internal consistency and correlation between children’s scores and their age was determined by Spearman’s correlation.

Results: Content validity index  for total of 240 words were 1. In assessing reliability of this test Spearman’s correlation and internal consistency were 0.87 and 0.83 obtained respectively. There was a significant correlation between children’s ability to respond and their age (p<0.0005).

Conclusion: Pictures test for assessing the ability for perception of words in different categories of 6-13 years old children have appropriate content validity and reliability. In the age range of the study, child's ability to perception of words increases with age.

Keywords: Picture Perceptive Objective Vocabulary Test, children, Validity and Reliability