Structural and Semantic Indicators development Process of Speech Quality in Two Age Groups of 5-6 and 6-7 Years of Healthy Persian-Speaking Children

The study of healthy children's performance and exploration of the developmental process concerning language categories and levels can establish a suitable foundation for creating developmental tests to assess language proficiency in healthy children. Connected speech, in the form of a description or verbal report of the related events, refers to a multidimensional skill exhibiting the linguistic and cognitive knowledge level. The individual’s connected speech sampling is employed to assess the developmental indicators of speech quality for each age group.

The present research aimed to investigate the speech development process of healthy Persian-speaking children, 2215 utterances of 5-7-year-old healthy Persian-speaking children from 200 descriptive speech samples were analyzed according to a list of speech quality indicators, out of which 100 speech samples belonged to boys and 100 speech samples to girls. On the other hand, 100 speech samples were produced by 5-6-year-old children and 100 speech samples by 6-7-year-old children. The whole utterances included 17427 words.

The research results revealed a significant difference between the two groups in terms of speech analysis indicators of “number of utterances”, “number of grammatical words”, “number of nouns”, “number of verbs”, “number of pronouns”, and “number of conjunctions”, which are all structural indicators, i.e.

In the development process from the 5-6-year-old children group to the 6-7-year-old ones, these indicators have more significant development and may be used in assessing development processes.