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.

percentage of vowel correct scale in Persian speaking children

The Percentage of vowel correct [PVC] is one of the indices in the development of articulation and phonological skills in children that can be measured with speech samples that could be extracted from the single word or connected speech tests. The aim of this study is to introduce the PVC scale in Persian speaking children and investigate its validity and reliability. This validation study was conducted on 387 monolingual Persian speaking children aged between 3-6, that were selected from 12 nurseries and kindergartens in north-western of Tehran. The instrument for measuring PVC was Phonological Picture naming Test which its Content Validity Ratio [CVR] was assessed by Speech Language Pathologists and linguists. The comparison PVC scores in with and without phonological disorders [using Independent t-tests] and the relationship of PVC scores with age [using Kruskal Wallis test] was used for determining construct validity of the scale. Test-retest and scoring rescoring were assessed, using Spearman's correlation coefficients, intra-class correlation coefficients [ICCs], standard errors of measurement [SEMs] and coefficients of variations [CVs]. Construct validity was confirmed with a significant difference between PVC scores of Children with and without phonological disorders [respectively: P<.001 and P<.05] and different age groups. Spearman's correlation coefficients, intra-class correlation coefficients [ICCs], standard errors of measurement [SEMs] and coefficients of variations [CVs] for test- retest respectively were [.65,.65,.48,.08] and for scoring-rescoring respectively were [.71,.69,.33,.08]. Results show that the PVC Scale is probably to be a reliable and valid instrument for evaluating articulation competence of Persian speaking children in clinical settings and research projects

[Developing a story retelling test for the assessment of language structure in Persian-speaking children]

Valid identification, prevention, and treatment of language disorders have a high priority for the clinicians. Story retelling is a method for studying language development which is faster than other procedures in implementing and analyzing, and has a reliable scoring system. The aim of this project is to construct story retelling test for assessing language structure in 6-7 year old, Persian children. An appropriate story for 6-7 year old children was written by the help of a speech pathologist, a linguist, and a novelist. The validity of the constructed story was checked by 14 experts. Then related pictures were design and their validity was examined. The test was conducted on 72 children [36 girls, 36 boys] of 6-7 years. The reliability was administered with a test-retest design with a two week interval. The reliability of the scoring system was evaluated with inter-rater method. Content validity index for this test was 89%, interclass correlation was 83%, and standard error of measurement was 2.76. The interclass correlation for scoring system was 93% and Pearson's correlation was 90%. Correlation of the test-retest scores was statistically significant [p<0.01]. This story retelling test has appropriate validity and reliability. It is suitable for quick assessment of language structure in 6-7 year old, Persian children