somayeh hasanzadeh

 The poor performance of neck proprioception is a risky factor for athlete’s head and neck injury. Muscle fatigue as an inevitable factor of any physical activity can cause disorder in proprioception performance. This study intends to investigate the effect of cervical muscular fatigue on neck proprioception performance in elite karate athletes in comparison to non-athletes. 

 Sixteen professional karate athletes and sixteen non-athletes participated in this study. Cervicocephalic relocation test measuring angle repositioning error during active cervical extension and rotation movements was used to assess neck proprioception ability, before and after isotonic muscular fatigue. Data were analyzed by independent T-test and paired T-test with SPSS (version 20) and alpha level set at 0/05. 

 There is no significant difference in neck sense status before and after neck muscular fatigue in both groups. Also, there is significant difference in neck proprioception performance between karate athletes and non-athletes following extension (P<0.05). In addition, athletes had greater joint position errors than non-athletes. 

 Although muscular fatigue did not affect proprioceptive neck performance, probably the effects of degenerative changes in neck proprioception and the acceleration repeated movements in karate athletes weaken their neck proprioception function in some direction in comparison to non-athletes. Therefore, it is important to improve the performance of neck proprioception in karate athlete's trough special neck proprioception training.

Reading is one of the acquired skills of human beings, which is based on basic language abilities. The acquisition of these prerequisite reading skills (phonological awareness and naming speed), in addition to reading, have a fundamental impact on speech and language development, as well as learning and academic performance. As a result, the child will be able to express the contents of their mind with more speed and thoroughness. The aim of this study was to assess the reading prerequisite skills, i. e phonological awareness and naming speed, in preschool children.This study is cross-sectional. The population of the study is 80 Farsi speaking 5-6 years old preschoolers, Stratified cluster random sampling among preschool centers located in four regions: North, East, West and South of Mashhad was done. Variables including age, gender, phonological combining, phonemic analysis, the first word phoneme detection, last word phoneme diagnosis, syllable counting, recounting the word, phoneme recognition playoff, the first syllable recognition and rapid naming (frequency images). Tehrani 1380 test was used, and the statistical analyses was conducted by SPSS 21 software and the tests ShapiroWilk, Mann-Whitney, and Spearman correlationThe normality test results showed that, except for naming speed, all the other quantitative variables do not show a normal distribution pattern (p<0.05).The sole significant difference between boys and girls was more first word phoneme detection in girls than boys (p=0.035). After stratification for the confounding factors age and sex, there was a significant reverse correlation between the first word phoneme recognition and rapid naming (r=0.404)Based on the present results, speech pathologists can be advised that difficulty in phonological awareness, in the ages 5-6, does not necessitate a therapeutic intervention that includes naming speed.