ABSTRACT
Background: Since most clinical treatments of Persian children's language impairments are based on either the therapist, clinicians' experiences [mostly], or English language norms [sometimes], comparing two minor indices of speech quality, namely "mean Length of Utterance" [MLU] and "mean length of five phrasal utterances" [MLFPU] between different age groups of children, would be unequivocally efficient to help diagnose and treat Farsi-Speaking Children with language impairments
Methods: To compare the two mentioned indices of 2 to 5-year-old normal Farsi-speaking children, the speech samples of 500 children were scrutinized by elicitation, transcription, and statistically analyzing their language samples
Results: The net results prove that as the children's ages grow from 2 to 5, the two mentioned indices increase and extend as well
Conclusion: The influence of chronological age on the indices varies, regarding the type of language samples. Hence, the analysis of speech quality indices in assessment of children's language ability has to be performed based on the language sampling methods
ABSTRACT
Background: One language-related area that has recently received more attention from researchers working in the field of stuttering is phonological working memory. This article aimed to identify phonological skills of working memory in children with stuttering in comparison with normal children, and to obtain the relationship between the increase in the number of syllables in nonwords and the mean percentage of error in non-word repetition in both groups, then to compare them with each other
Methods: Thirty children participated in the study, 15 children who stutter and 15 normal children which were matched by age, gender and socio-economic status. Cases of this study were recruited by non random convenience sampling. The research data collection was based on non-word repetition test. The test included 40 non-words. Independent t-tests and linear regression were used for data analysis
Results: Results revealed that in all cases the mean percentage of error was higher in children who stutter than normal children, but the difference was not statistically significant [P>0.05]. Also the mean percentage error did not show a regular increase by increasing the number of syllables in the non-words. So that, in both groups of the study the highest mean percentage of error was related to single-syllable non-words then three-syllable and two-syllable ones
Conclusion: The results of the present research from previous researches support the view that children with stuttering may have some degree of delay and slow in phonological working memory abilities when compared to normal children. It is proposed that in future more researches could be done in more samples, in different age groups of children and adults who stutter
ABSTRACT
Due to limitation of standardized tests for Persian-speakers with language disorders, spontaneous language sampling collection is an important part of assessment of language protocol. Therefore, selection of a language sampling method, which will provide information of linguistic competence in a short time, is important. Therefore, in this study, we compared the language samples elicited with picture description and storytelling methods in order to determine the effectiveness of the two methods. In this study 30 first-grade elementary school girls were selected with simple sampling. To investigate picture description method, we used two illustrated stories with four pictures. Language samples were collected through storytelling by telling a famous children's story. To determine the effectiveness of these two methods the two indices of duration of sampling and mean length of utterance [MLU] were compared. There was no significant difference between MLU in description and storytelling methods [p>0.05]. However, duration of sampling was shorter in the picture description method than the story telling method [p<0.05]. Findings show that, the two methods of picture description and storytelling have the same potential in language sampling. Since, picture description method can provide language samples with the same complexity in a shorter time than storytelling, it can be used as a beneficial method for clinical purposes