فهرست مطالب fatemeh hassanati

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders across the world receive pediatric rehabilitation services. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic challenged the rehabilitation community providing services for these children. The aim of the study was to outline the number, variety and characteristics of telerehabilitation services for children with neurodevelopmental disorders in the era of Covid-19.

To identify relevant literature, the scoping review method was used. Our results were presented according to PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. The nine-step updated scoping review method by Peters et al. including some pre-search, search and post-search steps was conducted. A structured search of three databases of the Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus was conducted for the studies published during 1 January 2020 to 12 December 2022. The extracted literature was reviewed in two steps by two independent reviewers.

Twenty-seven articles met the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States. Services provided by telerehabilitation were mostly tele-intervention (n=19, 70.37%) followed by tele-evaluation (n=5, 18.52%). More than half of the studies used tele-conferencing for providing their services (n=15, 55.56%).

Although the variety of telerehabilitation service deliveries seems to have increased and even the number of participants in the studies has increased, still considering the rapid spread of the pandemic, the studies seem not to be adequately organized in terms of methods.

There has been increased interest in using telepractice in clinical services during COVID-19. Using telepractice is little known in speech and language therapy. However, the parents and speech therapists were satisfied with this method. Therefore, this scoping review aims to compare tele speech therapy and face-to-face speech therapy during the COVID-19 pandemic and determine the efficacy of available telepractices in speech therapy.

This scoping review was according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guideline. The authors systematically searched Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus databases with specific eligibility criteria. The eligibility criteria were studies published from 1 January 2020 to 10 May 2023 from a peer-reviewed journal and written in English. In addition, the articles were about speech therapy in children during COVID-19.

Fifteen articles were included in this scoping review. Results showed that approximately all speech therapists used tele practice during the pandemic. Parents and students are satisfied with this method but have problems with it. On the other hand, some parents and SLPs preferred tele practice accompanied by face-to-face intervention. Furthermore, few studies determined the efficacy of tele practice with clear structural methods in specific populations.

Although tele speech therapy is acceptable for providing speech and language therapy services to children with swallowing and communication disorder, speech-language therapists should increase their information and technology to achieve successful results Moreover, parents must play an essential role in telepractice services to facilitate effective communication between clinicians and families.

Lexical access problems are one of the limitations observed in children with developmental language disorders during the initial years of schooling. Semantic context has a powerful influence on lexical access. The cross-modal visual-auditory picture-word interference paradigm is a method for studying adults and children's lexical access. Because few studies have examined lexical access in Persian-speaking children, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of different semantic contexts on lexical access in children with and without developmental language disorder. 

In this experimental study, 20 children aged 7-9 years with developmental language disorders and 20 age-matched peers were recruited according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. At first, the picture-word interference paradigm was prepared. In so doing, 16 common pictures of objects paired with four auditory interfering words (related verb, related noun, unrelated verb, and unrelated noun) were presented to the children in a silent condition to determine their naming accuracy and latency. The DMDX software calculated the naming latency. The percentage of correct names also calculated naming accuracy. 

Naming latencies were significantly faster in children without language disorders (P≤0.05). In addition, a reliable interference effect was found. According to the results, naming latencies were significantly faster for related verb distractors than unrelated verbs and related noun distractors (P<0.05). In addition, a significant difference was observed between the silent and interference conditions regarding the naming accuracy. However, accuracy was not affected by distractors. 

Different semantic contexts affect lexical access differently in children. These differences cause semantic relatedness between verbs and nouns in lexical networks. The present study findings indicate that lexical knowledge and semantic relatedness are lower in children with developmental language disorders than in those with typical language development. These results can be useful for future studies and interventions on lexical access in children with and without language disorders.

The first three years of life are a critical period for development. Environmentalstimuli have positive effects on the development of speech and language.Language skills involve the development of expressive and receptive skillsamong children. Speech and language disorders during childhood haveimportant negative outcomes in the life of the child. Therefore, early detectionof children at risk in the preliminary phases of development and implementingearly intervention for them are very important. In this case study, the effectsof early language intervention in children with a developmental languagedisorder (DLD) was investigated. A twenty-seven-month-old child diagnosedwith an autism spectrum disorder )ASD) was evaluated in this case study.Occupation and speech therapy was performed for him. Results showed that theearly intervention was essential for improving the child’s communication, andproper environmental stimuli could prevent possible problems in the future. Inaddition, the results revealed that child professionals should not adopt a “waitand see” attitude for improving development.

Word retrieval problems are among the limitations observed in children with specific language impairment during the initial schooling years. These restrictions are predictive of reading problems and poor performance at school. Additionally, studies on lexical access in Persian speaking children are scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and compare naming accuracy and latency in children with and without specific language impairment.

Twenty 7-9-year-old children with specific language impairment and 20 age-matched peers were recruited as the study participants. They were requested to name the 128 black and white line-drawing pictures from a Persian picture naming set for children, as rapidly as possible. We compared the effects of psycholinguistic variables on naming latency in the explored children with and without specific language impairment.

Linear mixed-effects modeling presented an interaction between the research groups and the psycholinguistic variables. Significant main effects were found for name agreement (P≤0.00) and the age of acquisition (P=0.05) in children with typical language development; significant effects for name agreement (P≤0.00) and log frequency (P≤0.00) were revealed in children with specific language impairment. 

The obtained models indicated that psycholinguistic factors could differently affect the naming latency in children with and without specific language impairment. Factors that may have accounted for the findings are discussed in this paper.

The lexical-level deficits are one of the hallmark limitations observed in early school-age children with specific language impairment. These problems are the predictors of reading problems and poor performance at school. Most studies in Persian-speaker children with specific language impairment have focused on syntax and morphology and the naming errors profile of these children are overlooked. This study aimed to investigate the naming accuracy, latency, and the error profile of these children. This was an observational study. Twenty children with specific language impairment were selected according to the clinical judgment of two speech therapists from speech therapy clinics and 100 children with typical language development aged from 7 to 9 years were randomly selected from public schools. The Persian picture naming set was presented by DMDX for the examination of picture naming skills. Naming errors were categorized as semantic, formal, mixed, non-word, unrelated, and others errors. Then, the data were investigated in terms of descriptive statistics and analysis of differences by the Independent t test and Mann-Whitney U test. The Persian-speaker children with specific language impairment name significantly slower and less accurate than the children compared to children with normal language development (P≤0.05). Although semantic errors were the most frequent errors in the two groups, the score differences of formal and omission errors were significant between the groups (P≤0.05). The different naming accuracy and latency scores between the two groups may be due to language delay and the inefficiency of the semantic system in children with specific language impairment. There are a variety of word retrieval errors in Persian-speaker children. Although, there are differences between the two groups, the error type in picture naming cannot be used for differentiating between them

  Cross-linguistic studies on picture naming tasks have shown that several psycholinguistic variables predict naming accuracy and latency. However, differing effects of these variables across languages and age groups are unclear. The aim of this study was first to examine the normative data for a set of picture stimuli using psycholinguistic features of name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition. The second aim was to report on the effects of the psycholinguistic variables on timed picture naming in children. At first, 128 pictures from Cycowicz et al’s study (1997) were selected and collect normative data for each item. Then 128 black and white pictures were presented to 120 healthy Persian speaking children aged 7-9-year-old to measure the reaction time as it relates to psycholinguistic variables. The regression analysis revealed that only name agreement and age of acquisition could be considered as significant predictors of naming latency for the Persian speaking children. We concluded that psycholinguistic features such as name agreement and age of acquisition might have effect on the naming skills in children like in adults