ناهید بهارلویی

The elderly population is increasing in the world as the levels of health and life expectancy increase, so more studies are needed in the fields of longevity and concequent changes in communication behaviors. Quick Speech in Noise Test (QSIN) examines auditory comprehension of the people in the presence of noise. The aim of the current study was to compare the results of QSIN in young adults and the elderly with normal hearing threshold.

In the present descriptive-analytic and cross-sectional study, samples were selected through availability sampling. The study population consisted of 31 elderly and 31 young adults selected according to inclusion criteria. Audiometric tests of pure tone-acoustic Immitance and speech audiometric as well as QSIN were administered in the elderly and young adult groups.

In Signal to Noise Ratios (SNR) 25, 20, 15,10,5, and 0 dB, there was a significant difference between the young adult and elderly groups (P<0.05). But in 25 SNRs, no significant difference was found between the two groups (P>0.05). Also, the results showed that SNR 5 SNR and SNR0 had significant differences with SNRs in 10, 15, 20, and 25 between the elderly and young adult groups (P <0.05).

According to the results obtained in the present study, elderly people may be different from the young adult group in cortical and sub cortical processing activities of the brain, and thus may have the weaker speech in noise comprehension ability compared with the young adult group.

Deaf children have lost part of their language learning course due to the lack of auditory input, and in most cases, they will face with many problems in their language-learning growth. One aspects of the language is phonological awareness that can be seen as an introduction to the development of future reading; moreover, training in phonological awareness is effective on development of decoding skills. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of an educational intervention of phonological awareness, on the increase of phonological awareness among the Persian-speaking students with cochlear implant in first grade of primary schools in Ahvaz City, Iran.
28 Persian-speaking children with cochlear implant were randomly assigned to equal groups of experimental and control. The students’ parents signed the formal consent form; then, the phonological awareness skill test was administered in both groups. The experimental group received the phonological awareness training, and the phonological awareness skill test was administered again in both groups.
After the intervention, the mean score of phonological awareness skill increased significantly in experimental group (P = 0.001). Moreover, the mean score of each phonological awareness subskill was significantly more increased in the experimental group compared to the control group (P The results of the study showed that the proposed phonological training program improved phonological awareness skills in children with cochlear implant. Application of this program is recommended.

Anomia - naming deficiency - is considered as the main symptom of aphasia. Although there are various treatments for naming deficiency, with the advent of technology, one of the ways that has expanded today is the use of computers in treatment. Although the effectiveness of computerized therapies has been investigated in different languages, due to the lack of examination of these treatments in the Persian language, the present study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of TAVANA computerized therapy in naming skills in a Persian-speaking nonfluent aphasia patient.
This was a single-subject study in which a patient with nonfluent aphasia and naming deficiency was chosen to receive computer therapy. In addition, a collection of non-teaching words was considered to evaluate the effect of generalization for the patient. Visual analysis and effect size of the percetage of non-overlapping data (PND) were used for data analysis.
Computer therapy improved the confronting naming ability in the client (PND = 100). There was also an improvement in the maintenance and generalization of untrained items as a result of this treatment (PND = 100).
The results of the study support the effectiveness of TAVANA computerized therapy, as an effective, intensive, low-cost, and admissible treatment in the Persian language, in improving the naming skills of a patient with nonfluent aphasia.

Naming impairment is known as the main symptom of aphasia. Despite the fact that numerous studies have found evidences to support the effective role of therapeutic interventions in recovery of naming impairments, treatment cannot be generalized for most of these interventions. The factors involved in no generalization in treatment are not definite yet. Damaged stage in word-finding process can be one of these factors. The present study aimed to investigate this relation. Treatments used in this study concentrated on damaged stage of word-finding.
In a cross-over single-subject study, four participants with aphasia whose problem was mainly naming were selected. Each patient received semantic features analysis and phonological components analysis treatments. For each patient, a series of untrained words were considered in which generalization was checked with validation of naming correctly.
Both therapeutic approaches led to improvement in the ability of naming untrained words; although generalization was significantly more in participants with phonological impairment following phonological treatment and participants with semantic impairment following semantic treatment.
The ability to predict a generalized pattern for a particular therapeutic approach has clinical significance. Our suggestion is that based on a psychological-linguistic model, first the stage of word-finding damage must be determined, and then commensurately, the treatment which targets the defeat stage must be applied.

There is word finding problems among children with language and learning disorders. One of the most popular evaluation ways for word finding is formal assessment. The test of word finding- second edition is a most reliable one. In this study, validity and reliability of this test is determined in Isfahanian 8-11 year- old students. This is a transactional- descriptive survey. After translation and change, the test of word finding randomly administered in 210 children 8-11 year- old. Parent’s permission was taken, too. Test’s items were analyzed by using Item-Response Theory and entering responses’ pattern in form of numbers (zero and one) in Bilog-MG(6) software. Then, reliability was achieved by using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha and statistical indexes of intermediate form were calculated by using SPSS (13) software. The mean of word finding scores in 3 age group (8, 9, 10, 11 years) were 40.30, 45.51, 48.05 and 45.11 respectively. It shows that when the children become older, the mean of scores increase gradually (Pvalue: 0.00, α: 0.05). Also the reliability of test was 0.84. The discrimination power of items in Persian students is equal to the discrimination power of German's test. It shows that this test has a good potential to differentiate between students with various word finding abilities. Reliability of this test is good based on psychometric indexes. Therefore, a valid and reliable test to evaluate word finding of Persian children is produced.

Multiple sclerosis is a progressive disease of the central nervous system that deteriorates myelin sheath and produce plaques in white matters of the brain and spinal cord. Studies indicated that Language skills of these patients are affected. Speech and Language Pathologists take a little attention to the language skills of these patients. The purpose of this study was to comparison some of the syntactic skills in Relapsing Remitting Multiple sclerosis and normal adults’ resident in Esfahan Province. In this cross-sectional descriptive- analytical study was investigated 17 adult with Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis from Esfahan MS centre and 34 normal adults that matched in age, sex and education with patient group. When persons had entry criterion then was took speech sample about their biography. This sample was recorded and wrote. Then was gathered and compared data. This study found significant difference between normal and patient groups in mean max leanghtsntence(Pvalue = 0/043) and number total sentence (Pvalue =0/001). There was no significant difference between two groups in mean leanght sentence and simple sentence ratio and compound sentence ratio. however patients in this study suffered to mild degree Multiple sclerosis (EDSS mean = 1/35) but they had differences in some of syntactic skills. This findings conform need to assessment language skills of this patients and intervention this problems.

Developmental dyslexia has been recognized as being one of the most common types of reading disorders. According to phonological deficit hypothesis، the main difficulties in affected children are phonological processing and making incorrect representations. Nonword repetition task taps the encoding، storage and retrieval of phonological representations، and therefore، is an appropriate tool for measuring these skills، particularly phonological working memory. This task involves a variety of underlying processes including speech perception، lexical and phonological knowledge، motor planning، and articulation. The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of dyslexic students in nonword repetition task and to analysis their errors. This was a nonexprimental analytical cross-sectional study in which a case control paradigm was adopted. Participants were 15 students with dyslexia and 35 normal students، all of whom were studying at the third grade of elementary school at the time of the study. These students did not have any gross neurological impairments، psychiatric problems or speech- language disorders and had normal intelligence and hearing acuity. 40 one-to-four-syllable nonwords were used for the assessment. Broad transcription was applied for recording responses. The results were statistically analyzed using descriptive and analytic methods. The dyslexic group obtained lower scores than did the control group in nonword repetition task and the difference between these two groups was statistically significant. The errors of dyslexic students in nonword repetition showed that they suffer some deficits in accessing، maintaining and retrieving phonological codes. Moreover، they have difficulties in distinguishing phonemes that were poorly encoded.

One of the important evaluative indexes of language development is word finding ability. The application of formal assessment tools, such as TWF-2, is the most common way of assessing this ability in western countries. There is not any formal assessment tool for assessment of this ability in Iran. Therefore this study aimed to determine the validity and reliability of Persian version of this test in 6-to-8-year-old children of Isfahan-Iran. Having translated in and modified for Farsi language, the test of word finding-2 was randomly administered on 140 Farsi-speaking students. The obtained raw data were analyzed using the Item-response theory. The mean scores for word finding, difficulty index and discrimination power of test items were determined and the results were discussed. Reliability of both forms of test was 0.84. The Farsi-speaking student’s mean of word finding scores is lower than their English counterparts and this can be an explanation for higher difficulty index of test items for these students.

IntroductionNumerical learning is now considered as an essential educational component and any deficit in mathematical understanding strongly relates to impaired functioning, not just at school but also in everyday life. There is, however, a paucity of empirical studies about basic cognitive factors that can specifically influence the growth of mathematical skills in school-age children of early grades. So, the underlying cognitive factors that are associated with growth of math ability at different stages of one’s educational development have yet to be empirically determined. Phonological awareness may affect the development of mathematical skills since strategies of speech-sound processing are used to treat problems in this academic domain.Materials and MethodsThis was a descriptive-analytic study in which 70 first graders with normal IQ were randomly chosen. There was no history of hearing and/or language disorders and failure in primary school among these subjects. All participants underwent a phonological awareness test and Iran key Math Mathematics Test. Obtained data were statistically analyzed with SPSS software.ResultsThere was a significant correlation between total score of phonemic awareness skill and that of mathematic skill (r=.97). Moreover, the scores of all phonemic awareness subtests significantly related to those of mathematic subtests. The strongest relationship were observed between counting and middle phoneme deleting (r=74) and geometry and segmenting had the weakest relationship with each other (r=.42).ConclusionsThe results of present study replicated those obtained through other researches. However, correlation coefficients of this study are different from those reported in other studies. This can be due to several factors among which difference in the count of variables, difference in the categorizing of phonological awareness and mathematical skills and using different test can be noted.

Reading accuracy depends on such skills as normal hearing, auditory perception, auditory memory, normal visual perception and visual memory. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between two reading skills, namely accuracy and rate of reading, and visual memory of non-words among female first-grade students living in Isfahan-Iran In a descriptive – analytic cross-sectional study, one-hundred female first-grade students were randomly selected from the available population. There was no evident sign of articulation, fluency, visual, auditory and intellectual problems in any of participants. Each subject was first asked to read the test material while her reading performance was being recorded and then she underwent a visual memory test of non words. Finally through analyzing the recorded material, reading accuracy and rate scores were determined for all subjects. according to the study’s results, reading accuracy and visual memory were significantly correlated in first-graders (P=0/01). There was, however, no statistically significant relationship between rate of reading and visual memory in the studied population (P=0/614). A significant association was found between reading accuracy score and visual memory of non-words. Visual memory is considered as a basic factor in development of reading skills. The results of this study are in agreement with those of other studies in that visual memory and visual recognition are more related to reading skills than any other cognitive skills. Therefore, by regard to the importance of relationship between visual memory and reading skills, visual memory should be tested in first-grade students.

The majority of children with articulation disorders attending speech therapy centers typically don’t demonstrate the well-known pathologic signs of articulation disorders (such as oral structural abnormity, environmental deprivation, mental retardation, hearing loss, etc). With regard to the fact that there is strong evidence for co-occurrence of articulation disorders and oral apraxia in the literature, it is reasonable to assume the presence of oral apraxia in this population. Therefore, to diagnose oral apraxia in children with articulation disorders, an efficient tool is required.Methods and materials: At first, an oral apraxia checklist with 20 tasks which were frequently recommended for the assessing this disorder in the related literature was developed and its validity and reliability were detected. Then from the population of 4-to-5 year old children, a sample of 74 normal subjects was selected to examine their performance over the above-mentioned tasks and to determine the cut-off point for the checklist. The inclusion criteria was a normal medical history and the ability to successfully pass two tests, namely an phonetic test which assessed the normality and appropriateness of articulator skills and a oropharyagial test which aimed to detect any sensory–motor problems in the oral and facial areas. The cut-off point was established on the basis of the false positive and specificity amounts obtained from the raw data. Performing only 15 tasks of the checklist’s 20 tasks was found to be the cut-off point. This means that every child with an age ranging from 4 to 5 years old, who pass only 15 or less tasks successfully, is affected by oral apraxia. At the cut-off point of 15 tasks, the amount of specificity was 94.5% and false positive was 5.4%. According to the results of this study, the oral apraxia can be validly diagnosed in 4-5-year old children using this newly developed test. Co-occurrence of oral apraxia with articulation disorder implicates planning an efficient intervention management which takes its presence into account.

Phonological Awareness (PA) is a extra linguistic skill and defined as individual awareness of constituent’s sounds of the word. This skill is a prerequisites of learning to Read. Many researchers suggested reciprocal relation between PA and Reading. This research determined level of PA-fundamental ability of reading-in normal first grade femal students of Isfahan & shahinshar to compare two current method of Reading that are used in educational system of Iran. The method used in this research is cross-sectional, descriptive-analytic and was done by 106 first grade female students who were normal and selected randomly in Isfahan & shahinshar cities. 51 students had teached by phonetic method and rest of them had teached by whole word method. The selection way of children was: this children had not any articulation, vision, reading, learning and cranial nerve disorders and this children investigated by Phonological Awareness test. scores of children by test calculated and this scores analyzed by t-test in Spss software. The mean score of phonological awareness in phonetic method was 51.98 and in whole word method was 57.46. There was a significant differences between them in their scores (P=0.047). In addition,within subtests of phonological awareness task,mean score of first phoneme omission in whole word method was 4.84 and in phonetic method was 3.33. There was a significant difference between them in their scores (P=0.001). In the rest of subtests was no significant difference between them. Based on this study, a significant correlation could be found in Phonological Awareness between both group and in other hand, there was a significant correlation between scores of first phoneme omission in both groups (Whole word and Phonetic method).Based on importance of phonological awareness as a predictor of reading, we suggest more research in this outline must be done.