Speech Intelligibility in Persian Children with Down Syndrome

Objectives: one of the most effective methods to describe speech disorders is the measurement of speechintelligibility. the speech intelligibility indicates the extent of acoustic signals that correctly speakerproduces and hearer receives. the purpose of this study was to investigate the speech intelligibility in thepersian children with down syndrome; age range was 3 to 5 years, who had spoken persian.methods: this cross- sectional study investigates 12 children (6 girls and 6 boys) with down syndromewho had referred to speech therapy clinic in hamadan city and 12 normal children (6 girls and 6 boys)who went to the kindergarten in hamadan city .the pictures of speech intelligibility test (in persianlanguage) were used to collect speech samples of participants. the participant’s voice was recorded byvoice recorder and was investigated in two age groups.results: the results of this study indicated the means of speech intelligibility was 92.25 for normalchildren and 35.08 for children with down syndrome. the correlation between age and speechintelligibility for normal children was 0.866 and for children with down syndrome was 0.352. the meanof speech intelligibility 2 for normal boys was 93 and for normal girls 91.5 and for boys with downsyndrome 34.66 and for girls with down syndrome 35.5.discussion: the difference between normal children and children with down syndrome was significant.one of the factors that affect speech intelligibility for children with down syndrome is difficulty withvoluntarily programming, combining, organizing, and sequencing the movements necessary for speech.