Comprision of Speech Sound Disorders in Persian and Arabic-Persian Educable Mental Retarded Children

Children with speech sound disorders form largest portion of speech language pathologist caseload. Aim of this study was to compare speech sound disorders in monolingual and bilingual educable mental retarded children. Subjects and In this descriptive analytic study, the number of participants was 354. One hundred forty two children were monolingual and 212 were Arabic-Persian bilingual. All of them were male. Results were analyzed with SPSS version 18, using chi-square test. Prevalence of speech sound disorders in monolingual children was 43 % and in bilinguals was 17.9 % (P<0.001). There was significant relation between speech sound disorders and bilinguism. In correlation with previous literature findings, the results from this study showed that speech sound disorders are more prevalent in mental retarded children comparing with mentally normal children. In addition, this disorder is more prevalent in monolingual children and supports the positive effect of bilingualism on articulation and phonological characteristics