Prevalence of Speech Language Disorders in Monolingual Persian Children with Normal Development During 2012-16

Background: speech-language disorders are associated with symptoms, suchas illiteracy, problems in social skills, as well as poor academic and professionalperformance. investigating the prevalence of the mentioned disorders would behelpful in programming for management of these disorders by preventing theassociated symptoms. since there is a lack of data on the prevalence of children’sspeech-language disorders in shiraz, investigating such issue is critical or earlydetection, intervention, and prevention of associated symptoms. the aimswere: 1) to estimate the prevalence of speech-language disorders in 4-6 year oldchildren in shiraz, and 2) to determine the relationship between these disorderswith gender and age.methods: a total of 1588 normal monolingual children (761 girls and 827 boys)of average socioeconomic status, aged 4-6 years were recruited in this crosssectionalstudy during 2012-16 in shiraz-iran. language samples were obtainedby describing series pictures. chi-square was used to analyze the data.results: 53 percent of the participants had at least one disorder. specifically,the rates for different disorders were articulation disorders: 40 percent; fluencydisorders: 13 percent; voice disorders: 3.3 percent; language comprehensiondisorders: 2.2 percent, and language expression disorders: 16.2 percent. boys hadhigher rates of disorders in comparison to girls. articulation and comprehensiondisorders were significantly higher amongst the younger age group, suggesting adecrease in these disorders as the age increased.conclusion: the results of this study generally correlate with those of previousones, showing that language exposure is a key factor in reducing speech languagedisorders. the high prevalence of speech-language disorders in shiraz indicatethe need for increase in public awareness, intervention efforts, and to furtherinvestigate the matter.