Development of Responding to Joint Attention in Typically Developing Children Across 9-30 Month

Objectives: Joint attention is one of the most important prerequisite of language and social development. There are two types of joint attention, Initiating joint attention and Responding to joint attention. This study examined the development of responding to joint attention in typically developing children in 8-30 month.

Methods: This study was cross-sectional. 61 children [40 female and 21 male] were examined in age 9, 12, 15, 18, 24 and 30 month. Tasks of joint attention scale of Early Social Communication Scales [ESCS] were used to assess children. Colmogrov-Smirinov and Kruskal-Wallis were used for data analysis and mean scores were computed for all groups.

Results: Data analysis showed that there was significant difference between mean ranks of groups. Children scores had an increasing pattern across 9 to 30 month.

Discussion: Results of this study indicated that responding to joint attention is developing from 9 to 30 month by considering the individual differences between children in every group.

Comprehension of Passive Structure: Study of Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

Objectives: Specific language impaired children, despite being normal in cognitive and neurological characteristics, and also normal levels of hearing, experience multiple problems in syntax comprehension. This study compared the passive comprehension in Persian-speaking typically developing children and Specific language impaired children.

Methods: 10 children with Specific language impairment, 10 typically developing children matched for age with Specific language impaired children, and 15 younger typically developing children responded to passive sentence comprehension using picture identification task.

Results: The results of study revealed significant differences in comprehension of passive sentences in Specific language impaired children and age-matched typically developing children. The difference in Comprehension of passive sentences was not statistically significant in Children with Specific Language Impairment and younger typically developing children. There were significant differences in the comprehension of passive sentences between two typically developing children groups.

Discussion: While age-matched typically developing children comprehend passive structure completely, it seems that Specific language impaired children and younger typically developing children still have not come to a full comprehension of the passive structure. Specific language impaired children compared with age-matched and younger typically developing children interpreted passive sentences mostly as active sentences.

Lexical access in Persian normal speakers: picture naming, verbal fluency and spontaneous speech

Lexical access is the process by which the basic conceptual, syntactical and morpho-phonological information of words are activated. Most studies of lexical access have focused on picture naming. There is hardly any previous research on other parameters of lexical access such as verbal fluency and analysis of connected speech in Persian normal participants. This study investigates the lexical access performance in normal speakers in different issues such as age, sex and education. The performance of 120 adult Persian speakers in three tasks including picture naming, verbal fluency and connected speech, was examined using "Persian Lexical Access Assessment Package". The performance of participants between two gender groups [male / female], three education groups [below 5 years / above 12 years / between 5 and 12 years] and three age groups [18 - 35 years / 36 - 55 years / 56 - 75 years] were compared. According to findings, picture naming increased with increasing education and decreased with increasing age. The performance of participants in phonological and semantic verbal fluency showed improvement with age and education. No significant difference was seen between males and females in verbal fluency task. In the analysis of connected speech there were no significant differences between different age and education groups and just mean length of utterance in males was significantly higher than females. The findings could be a primitive scale for comparison between normal subjects and patients in lexical access tasks, furthermore it could be a horizon for planning of treatment goals in patients with word finding problem according to age, gender and education