Syllable-based assessment of whole-word phonology in Persian-speaking children with social communication disorder
Background: Children with social communication disorder (SCD) struggle with implied meanings, indirect language, and non-verbal cues, and often show delays in language abilities. Although SCD’s impact on language development is well studied, research on non-English phonological skills—especially syllable measures—remains limited. Correct Syllables and Consonants (CSC) is a refinement of phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU), incorporating a syllable component and simplifying consonant scoring. By assigning one point per syllable peak and per correct consonant, CSC shifts pMLU to a syllable-based, prosodically focused measure.
Aim: This study investigates the utility of the CSC measure for assessing consonant accuracy and whole-word phonological proximity in Persian-speaking children with SCD during a narrative-based intervention.
Method/approach: This study used the CSC (Pye & Stengel, 2025) measure in three Persian-speaking boys with SCD (ages 3;7–5;1) across Initial, Treatment, and Maintenance phases to investigate their syllable and whole-word skills. This study applied Franke and Durbin’s (2011) nurturing narrative intervention. Phonetic transcriptions were aligned with audio in Phon (Hedlund & Rose, 2020), with 92% inter rater reliability between two native Persian SLPs. The study is approved by the IRB of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (IRB-24–043- CODI-OTHR).
Results/findings: The CSC results showed consistent syllable-level accuracy across children and phases, with produced values closely matching targets and minimal variation. In contrast, consonant accuracy showed larger target-produced differences and greater variability, particularly in the Initial phase, with partial convergence over time. Whole-word proximity rose from lower Initial values (~0.84–0.93) to consistently high values in later phases (~0.97–0.99), indicating strong alignment with the target; overall variability was driven by consonants, while syllable structure remained stable.
Conclusion: Consistent with Pye and Stengel (2025), these results support syllable-based measures as a stable and central component of whole-word phonology. CSC provides a transparent, clinically informative approach that links prosodic structure to overall phonological accuracy in Persian-speaking children with SCD.
Implications for children and families: You can focus on your child’s strong syllable patterns while gently supporting tricky sounds, helping you understand their speech better, and use everyday activities and stories to build clearer, more confident communication together.
Implications for practitioners: You can use syllable-based measures to identify stable prosodic strengths while targeting variable consonant accuracy, allowing you to design interventions that build on preserved structures and efficiently support whole-word intelligibility in children with SCD.
Keywords: correct syllables and consonants (CSC), syllables, children, Persian, social communication disorder (SCD)
This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: