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Objective: Communication can affect the personal and social life of people. According to International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), communication is one of the most important components of social participation and can have different functions such as behavior regulation (regulating the behavior of others to achieve a particular goal), social interaction (drawing attention of others to the self) and joint attention (attracting the attention of others to an event or particular object). Having knowledge of the development of communicative functions is so important in assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and early intervention. Despite the importance and effect of communicative functions in language and communication development, no study has been conducted yet that examines the communicative function development of normal Persian-speaking toddlers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of communicative functions in normal Persian-speaking children from 12 to 18 months of age, regardless of communicative expressions (such as gestures, vocalization, and words). Materials & Methods: This is a longitudinal observational study. The communicative function of 11 monolingual Persian-speaking 12-month-old children (7 boys and 4 girls) living in Tehran, Iran was investigated for 7 months. Sampling was done by using purposive and snowball non-probability sampling methods. All children had healthy medical history and normal growth, were from a family with a moderate socioeconomic status, and their parents had at least a high school diploma. The participants’ developmental status was assessed by Ages and Stages Questionnaire. A demographic form with acceptable content validity was also used to determine their demographic characteristics. For 7 months (once a month, each session for one hour), the examiner filmed the child-mother interaction during a semi-structured play with a set of toys at the child’s home. Afterwards, the recorded videos were coded according by the researcher and then entered into the SPSS V. 22 software. Descriptive statistics including mean and standard deviation were used to describe the data. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to determine the normality of data distribution, and repeated measures ANOVA (within-subject comparison) was used to analyze the data. Two raters were taught about the coding and rating of the communicative functions. To verify the validity of the data coding, 20% of the recorded samples were given to them to code communicative functions. The coding validity was determined by calculating the Intra-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC). Results: The mean frequency of behavior regulation and social interaction was constant from 12 to 18 months of age (P<0.05), while the mean frequency of joint attention was constant from 12 to 15 months of age (P<0.05) and then significantly increased at months 16 (P= 0.019), 17 (P= 0.023) and 18 (P= 0.003) compared to the 12th month. The ICC value as the criterion for coding validity was reported 90%. Conclusion: The mean frequency of joint attention increased significantly from 12 to 18 months of age, while it was constant for behavior regulation and social interaction. Our findings are consistent with the ICF’s social participation, stating that a child uses a particular type of communicative function to increase its participation in the society.

Objectives: The prelinguistic skills which pave the way for language development have always been an area of research in the Speech Therapy field. Although studying these skills is important, there is a study gap among Persian children. Therefore, this study explored prelinguistic skills among a sample of Persian-speaking children aged 6 to 24 months and made a comparison between different age groups. We also studied the effects of gender and family history of speech-language disorders on children’s prelinguistic abilities. Methods: In the present study, 277 mothers of Iranian Persian-speaking children aged 6 to 24 months were asked to fill a research-made checklist that evaluated the prelinguistic skills of their children. This study was cross-sectional and was conducted in Tehran City, Iran, in 2021. Children’s abilities in different age groups were compared using the analysis of variance (ANOVA), Scheffe test, the Kruskal-Wallis test, and the post-hoc test. The differences between the total scores of the two genders were also determined using the Mann-Whitney U test. Results: Comparing the prelinguistic skills in different age groups indicated a statistically significant increase in the scores as children grow up. Children with a positive family history of speech-language disorders scored lower on the checklist than the others (91.03±17.37). Furthermore, there were statistically significant differences between the two genders in developing gesture, vocalization, first words, social interaction, imitation, and play; girls had higher scores. Conclusion: Based on the studies conducted in different countries, prelinguistic skills develop as children grow up; these skills facilitate language acquisition and other social skills. The present study also demonstrated the development of these skills alongside children’s development. This similarity between Persian-speaking children and other children from different cultures and languages, as well as better performance in children with a negative family history of speech-language impairments, confirm the role of genetic factors in children’s development. Moreover, the differences in the development of some prelinguistic skills between girls and boys reveal the impact of various factors, such as social factors, on prelinguistic skills development.

In this study, the sequential associations between child communication acts, including spontaneous communication (SC) and elicited communication (EC), and the types of verbal responses of Iranian mothers (follow‐in nondirective, follow‐in directive, and redirective responses) were compared between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and young typically developing (TD) children. Participants were 29 children with ASD aged 3–6 years and 40 TD children aged 13–18 months, matched on expressive vocabulary. Using time‐window sequential analysis, maternal verbal responses within a time interval of 3 sec following child communication were examined during 15 min of video‐recorded mother–child free play interaction. Mothers in the two groups had broadly similar patterns of response to child communication acts, but some differences in responding to child EC. Across both groups, sequential associations were stronger for maternal follow‐in nondirective responses to child SC than for this type of response to child EC, and were stronger for follow‐in directive responses to child EC than for follow‐in directive responses to child SC. Child EC and SC acts were less likely to be followed by redirective responses than other maternal responses, again across both groups. Finally, mothers of children with ASD were more likely than mothers of TD children to follow‐in to child EC with both nondirective and directive responses. Our findings suggest that mothers of children with ASD synchronize their responses with their child's SC acts to the same extent as mothers of TD children, and are more synchronous in responding to their child's EC acts. Lay Summary This observational study examined how Iranian mothers verbally responded to their children's communication acts, based on whether the children's communication was spontaneous (unprompted) or elicited (prompted by the mother). Mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder or typical development responded to their children's spontaneous communication acts in similar ways, but showed some differences in responding to children's elicited communication. By prompting their children to communicate, mothers create opportunities to give additional verbal responses to their children, which may help to support children's further language development.

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