Audiovisual sentence repetition as a clinical criterion for auditory development in Persian-language children with hearing loss Mohammad Majid Oryadi-Zanjani a, b, * , Maryam Vahab a, b , Zahra Rahimi a , Anis Mayahi a a Department of Speech Therapy, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran b Rehabilitation Sciences Research Center, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran article info Article history: Received 16 August 2016 Received in revised form 11 December 2016 Accepted 12 December 2016 Available online 15 December 2016 Keywords: Hearing loss Audiovisual sentence repetition Persian-language children Speech-language pathologist Audiologist abstract Objectives: It is important for clinician such as speech-language pathologists and audiologists to develop more efficient procedures to assess the development of auditory, speech and language skills in children using hearing aid and/or cochlear implant compared to their peers with normal hearing. So, the aim of study was the comparison of the performance of 5-to-7-year-old Persian-language children with and without hearing loss in visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual presentation of sentence repetition task. Methods: The research was administered as a cross-sectional study. The sample size was 92 Persian 5e7 year old children including: 60 with normal hearing and 32 with hearing loss. The children with hearing loss were recruited from Soroush rehabilitation center for Persian-language children with hearing loss in Shiraz, Iran, through consecutive sampling method. All the children had unilateral cochlear implant or bilateral hearing aid. The assessment tool was the Sentence Repetition Test. The study included three computer-based experiments including visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual. The scores were compared within and among the three groups through statistical tests in a ¼ 0.05. Results: The score of sentence repetition task between V-only, A-only, and AV presentation was signif- icantly different in the three groups; in other words, the highest to lowest scores belonged respectively to audiovisual, auditory-only, and visual-only format in the children with normal hearing (P < 0.01), cochlear implant (P < 0.01), and hearing aid (P < 0.01). In addition, there was no significant correla- tionship between the visual-only and audiovisual sentence repetition scores in all the 5-to-7-year-old children (r ¼ 0.179, n ¼ 92, P ¼ 0.088), but audiovisual sentence repetition scores were found to be strongly correlated with auditory-only scores in all the 5-to-7-year-old children (r ¼ 0.943, n ¼ 92, P ¼ 0.000). Conclusions: According to the study's findings, audiovisual integration occurs in the 5-to-7-year-old Persian children using hearing aid or cochlear implant during sentence repetition similar to their peers with normal hearing. Therefore, it is recommended that audiovisual sentence repetition should be used as a clinical criterion for auditory development in Persian-language children with hearing loss. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. 1. Introduction According to McGurk effect, audiovisual integration is not sim- ply the sum of auditory and visual modalities [1]; In other words, what a child or an adult perceives by fusing auditory and visual modalities is completely different from what he/she receives by auditory-alone or visual-alone. Recent studies have revealed that spoken word perception scores in children with normal hearing (NH) and hearing loss (HL) were the highest one under audiovisual presentation condition [2e5]. In addition, the findings have indi- cated auditory modality preference even when auditory and visual stimuli are presented simultaneously in young children with and without HL [6,7]. Then, it could be assumed that the more children with hearing loss experience auditory stimulation, the more their performance will be in audiovisual speech perception tasks [5,8]. It is important for clinicians such as speech-language pathologists and audiologists to develop more efficient procedures to assess the development of auditory, speech and language skills in children * Corresponding author. Department of Speech Therapy, School of Rehabilitation sciences, Abiverdi1, Chamran Blvd., P.O. Box: 71345-1733, Shiraz, Iran. E-mail address: oryadi@sums.ac.ir (M.M. Oryadi-Zanjani). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology journal homepage: http://www.ijporlonline.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2016.12.009 0165-5876/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology 93 (2017) 167e171