The relationship of expressive language development and social skills in 4-6-year-old Persian-speaking children

Social interaction plays an essential role in acquisition of speech and language as one of the most important developmental factors. The recent studies indicated that language abilities have a close relationship to social skills. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship of development of expressive language and dimensions of social skills in 4-6-years-old Persian-speaking children. In this study, 123 normal Persian-speaking 4-6-year-old children (76 boys and 47 girls) who had all the specific criteria for normality were randomly selected from several preschools in Shiraz, Iran. During the first stage of testing, test of language development (TOLD) was administered to investigate language development of participants; later, the social skills rating system (SSRS) including the teacher's and parent's forms were completed by the parents and teachers of participants. The data were analyzed using Pearson's correlation coefficients. The correlations between expressive language and dimensions of social skills were significant (p<0.001), but teacher's form had a greater correlation with language development (p=0.031). Besides, Pearson's correlations between teacher's and parent's forms was not significant (p=0.27). According to our results, expressive language develops along with social skills development. On the other hand, these results are based on the differences between home and educational environment in social skills achievements of children. These findings are to be considered to provide crucial training in both environments for the children to improve the development of their expressive language.