Document Type : Original Articles

Authors

1 Speech Therapy Department, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran.

2 Rehabilitation Sciences Research Center, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran.

3 Department of Linguistics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

4 Speech Therapy Department, Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences University, Tehran, Iran

5 Pediatric neurology, Child growth and Development research center, Research Institute for primordial Prevention of Non-communicable Disease of Medical Genetics, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.

6 Graduate Student of Iranian Studies, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Background: The present pilot study aims at investigating the three features of time domain in speech in Persian-speaking children with Down syndrome.
Methods: In this Cross sectional study, our sample consisted of two 3-8-year-old children (2 males) with Down syndrome (4.9 years old and standard deviation of 1.52). Inclusion criteria were children with Down syndrome, aged 3-8 years old, no neurological or motor disorders, sensory disorders and psychiatric disorders. The voice sample of the children was analyzed with Praat, and the phonetic features of the voice onset time, vowel duration time and closure duration time were evaluated and descriptive statistics were reported by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version (SPSS, Inc., Chicago IL, USA; version 16).
 Results: we found that in /pa/, the mean of the voice onset time variable is (0.04±0.00) and in /ta/ the mean of the voice onset time variable is (0.04±0.00).
 Conclusion: According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that the speech time domain features in Persian-speaking children with Down syndrome were similar to these features in other languages, which could be due to problems with the tone and muscular strength in these children.

Keywords