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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of telling social stories on the use of some morphological features of speech in children with autism such as adverb, adposition, possession, article, compound noun, adjective and plural form of noun. This is an Interventional, quasi-experimental single group study with a pretest-posttest design. The study subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 10 Persian-speaking aged 7 to15 years old with autism spectrum disorder, requiring support, from all autism population in Qazvin Autism Center in 2019. The framework was based on the model of Brown 1973 and Naigles 2014 (taken from the research of Tek et.al 2014). Social stories were designed and organized, based on the model of Gray 1993. The children of autism received the intervention program in 10 individual sessions 30 to 45 minutes. The pre-test and post-test comparison of morphological categories in visual test and spontaneous test showed that the average use of names and particles in the post test was more than the pre-test for all cases. The biggest difference is related to the adposition. The result of the Wilcoxon test analysis showed that the training had a significant effect only on the visual test and on the article (according to the average of the pre-test and post-test, the statistical value and significance level = p˂0.05). 

 

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Autism is a neurocognitive disorder. Many children with autism do not have a change in language and usually tend to have literal interpretations of phrases, which makes it difficult to understand metaphorical language, which can be seen in both visual and visual metaphors. The aim of this study was to compare auditory and visual metaphorical perception in children with mild autism and normal children. The present study is a cross-sectional and causal-comparative study. The statistical sample of this study includes 30 boys aged 7 to 10 years with mild autism studying in educational centers for exceptional children in Mashhad and 30 normal children matched in terms of age who were selected by convenience sampling method. After initial language assessment, they were assessed by metaphorical perception test and U Mann-Whitney test and SPSS 23 software were used to analyze the data. The results of data analysis showed that in metaphorical perception in general there is a significant difference between autistic and normal children (P <0.001), also, in understanding visual and auditory metaphors, the two groups showed a significant difference (P <0/001). The obtained results indicate that compared to normal children, children with autism have a lower performance in terms of understanding visual and auditory metaphors, and considering this issue can be used in planning and designing educational content and rehabilitation interventions in order to improve educational performance and social benefit of these children.
 

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of telling social stories on the use of some morphological features of speech in children with autism such as adverb, adposition, possession, article, compound noun, adjective and plural form of noun. This is an Interventional, quasi-experimental single group study with a pretest-posttest design. The study subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 10 Persian-speaking aged 7 to15 years old with autism spectrum disorder, requiring support, from all autism population in Qazvin Autism Center in 2019. The framework was based on the model of Brown 1973 and Naigles 2014 (taken from the research of Tek et.al 2014). Social stories were designed and organized, based on the model of Gray 1993. The children of autism received the intervention program in 10 individual sessions 30 to 45 minutes. The pre-test and post-test comparison of morphological categories in visual test and spontaneous test showed that the average use of names and particles in the post test was more than the pre-test for all cases. The biggest difference is related to the adposition. The result of the Wilcoxon test analysis showed that the training had a significant effect only on the visual test and on the article (according to the average of the pre-test and post-test, the statistical value and significance level = p˂0.05). 

 

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This current and interdisciplinary research in the fields of cognitive science, clinical linguistics, neurobiology of language, and language pathology tries to solve language-related problems and disorders. The present research aims to provide a comparison of the effect of stimulating mirror neuron system through music induction and intentional movement imitation on the increase in the average number of verbs in a sentence in free speech of autistic children. For this purpose, first, two pilot studies were performed in 12 sessions on 2 autistic girls aged 6 and 7 for four weeks in Iran University of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Rehabilitation Sciences. After observing the positive and effective results of these two methods, other samples, i.e. 6 autistic monolingual Farsi speaking girls aged 5-8 were selected by convenience sampling, and underwent 42 sessions (i.e. three 20-30 minute session) of training over 14 weeks. The samples divided to two groups; during training intentional movement imitation in the first group including 3 subjects, no music was played in the class, while instrumental music (wordless music) was played in the class for the second group including 3 subjects during training intentional movement imitation. To evaluate the index of average number of verbs in a sentence, speech of the subjects, after and before intervention, was recorded during the play and everyday conversation. Then, the average number of verbs in their sentence was measured. The research findings were examined using SPSS software (version 20) by Paired-samples t-test and ANCOVA test. The obtained results indicate that the average number of verbs in the sentence significantly increased after the training course in both groups. In addition to the significant changes in all the subjects, the average number of verbs in the sentence in the subjects of the second group showed a significant difference compared to the first group. Based on the research findings, it can be said that stimulation of mirror neuron systems through music induction and intentional movement imitation positively affects the increase in the average number of verbs in the sentence in autistic children. However, it should be mentioned that audio-visual-motor stimulation of the neuron system has a greater impact on verbal skill development of autistic children.

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Autism is the most concrete developmental disorder. Upon recent epidemiological studies, the prevalence of autism is about one in every 165 children. Only 25% of them have intellectual disabilities. So, it was thought that the disorder is not necessarily with severe cognitive damages. While the poor performance of children's communication is the main features of them, language profile of symptoms varies from person to person. On the one hand, children have ability to perform their language as the norm, and on the other hand, children who do not have the ability to speak. So, Language impairment is one of the main characteristics of children with autism; however, findings of the language deficits in these children have been inconclusive, and even less is known about the language profiles of Persian children with autism. Due to the heterogeneity in autism, we also need extensive investigations on the properties of their language in different languages. The aim of this study was to evaluate grammatical characteristics in children with autism by revealing the differences between age-matched and language-matched normal children.
Rizzi believes each structure will consist of three layers from top to bottom as follows: The complementizer phrase (CP), inflectional phrase (IP) and verbal phrase (VP). So, the Complement layer is syntactic materials to build question phrases, complement phrases and relative clauses. Inflectional layer is related to inflection, negative and auxiliary verbs while verb phrases are related to verb and its arguments.
Research data were collected at 10 autistic (ages 6 to 9) and 20 normal children (10 age-matched and 10 language-matched). First, we used The GARS-2, and the ASSQ for diagnosing high-functional Autistic children. The GARS-2 is a norm-referenced instrument that assists teachers and clinicians in identifying and diagnosing autism individuals aged 3 years to 22 years and in estimating the severity of the child's disorder. The ASSQ is a questionnaire which was filled out by the parents or teachers of children or adolescents (6 to 17 years of age). It stands for screening autism spectrum disorders. Children’s expressive grammar was measured by using the Persian Photographic Grammar Expression Test. It is the first reliable and valid test that exclusively and accurately evaluates grammatical characteristics of Persian-speaking children. It concludes 32 grammatical structures it has good content validity (CVI>80), convergent validity of two test (r P= 0.5) and a correlation coefficient equal to 0.91 and greater than 0.9 respectively. Also, the test has a good internal consistency (kr21= 0.82). And finally data were analyzed with Mann-Whitney test.
 The result of this research showed that there is significant difference between autistic group and age-matched group in all structure except in WH question, yes/no question, different type of relative clauses, tense, aspect, mood, different type of pronouns and preposition. But comparison between autistic group and language-matched group showed that there is no significant difference in most structures except WH question, yes/no question, complementary relative clauses, different type of pronouns and preposition. Overall, autistic children demonstrated consistent expressive impairment in questions, relative clause and pronouns. It should be noted that these factors should be seriously considered in identification and treatment of this phenomenon.
 

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Since there is no special reading and writing book for the Persian children with autism and also their cognitive and linguistic abilities are different, the investigation of the effective factors on their reading skill is an important step for evaluating and modifying their using pedagogical books. In the other hand, Persian language has a different orthography and grapheme–phoneme correspondence from other languages (English, Italian...), so the effect of phonological awareness in it΄s reading is also different. Therefore, it’s necessary to identify the correlation between phonological awareness and reading in Persian children with autism. In this research, 26 children with autism and 30 normal Persian children living in Tehran were participated. Two tests (phonological awareness and reading) were performed and the results were analyzed by statistical tests. Results showed that in the group with autism, there is a meaningful correlation between word reading and phoneme combination and same first Phoneme recognition, and between non word reading and alliteration, phoneme segmentation, first and final phoneme deletion. In control group, there is a significant correlation between word reading (and non-word reading) and the onset and rhyme awareness, phonemic awareness, alliteration, same first phonemes, first phoneme and middle phoneme deletion. Also, there is a significant difference between the children with autism and control group in all subtests except for the syllable segmentation (0.075) and phoneme combination (0.163). Therefore, the degree of skill and correlation in the children with autism is different from the normal children and this should be noticed seriously in teaching reading.
 

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Autism spectrum disorder has always been associated with pragmatic language disorder. The present study aims to investigate the effect of audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises on improving (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism. It is a clinical trial with a pretest-posttest design. Subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 19 children aged 7 to 9 years old with autism spectrum disorder (level 1: requiring support). They received an intervention program organized in 18 individual sessions of 45 to 60 minutes. The findings of the study revealed that utilized audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved pragmatic level in children with autism spectrum disorder. In other words, it had a positive effect (p< 0.05) on the subscales of pragmatic skills in the Bishop Communication Checklist Questionnaire (1998). According to the results, it was shown that audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism.
 
1. Introduction
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which one of the most important symptoms is deficits in social communication and interaction. Children with ASD have a wide range of communication, social, and speech needs and require special behavioral and educational programs. Since communication problems have always been considered as a core feature of autistic children, interventions with the increase of language use and the reduction of communication and language problems are necessary.
Social stories that are used as an intervention are short stories written in conformance with the guidelines provided by Gray (1991). By reading, seeing and hearing them, the child prepares in his/her mind to face different situations and to show appropriate answers and reactions based on the relevant situation. According to the speech therapists, the lack of localized stories and along with them the pragmatic exercises for children with ASD were strongly felt since comprehensive exercises in Persian have not been designed yet for these children. Attempts are made to help the language development of children with disabilities (level 1) by using researcher-made tools that include social short stories and pragmatic exercises to increase their language abilities. The focus of the designed stories has been on improving communication skills in different situations as well as daily routines. In the present study, we seek to answer the following questions:
1. Do the audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improve pragmatic skills in children with level 1 autism (requiring support)?
2. Which of the subscales related to the cognitive-functional part of the children’s communication checklist of Kazemi et al. (2005) are affected by teaching the audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises?
 
2. Literature Review
Studies have found that verbal and non-verbal forms of communication are impaired in these children, and even if the linguistic structure ability left unimpaired, the social and communicative use is impaired. As a case in point, Surian et al. (1996) stated that these children ignore the principle of quantity in conversation, and the Gricean maxim violations made their speech irrelevant and meaningless.
Social stories were first developed by Carol Gray (1991) to assist individuals with autism spectrum disorders to develop greater social understanding. In these stories, by providing information about the conditions that have created difficulties for the child with ASD and explaining those conditions to him/her, we can help them to improve their mastery of the situation, with having role models and behavioral examples.
Feinberg (2001, cited in Quirmbach et al., 2008) has studied the effectiveness of social stories among 34 children with ASD, aged between eight to thirteen. In this study, pre-test and post-test methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness. The results of this study show that social stories have a positive effect on the initiation and establishment of communication between children with ASD and their peers.
In Iran, research has been conducted to teach social skills to children with autism through social stories. Tutuni (2011) compared and observed the performance of children with autism disorders structure domain (speech, syntax, semantics) and pragmatics (coherence, inappropriate initiation, stereotyped language, using context and conversational context) with the performance of normal Persian-speaking children. The performance of children with ASD is significantly different from the normal children. Children with autism have poorer performance in terms of pragmatics comparing to the linguistic structure. In addition , Golzari and Hemmati (2015) investigated the effect of social story intervention on improving the social skills of male students with autism. The results showed that the mean scores of social skills and its subscales (ability to understand the emotions and views of others, ability to start interacting with others, and ability to maintain interaction with others) in the experimental group increased significantly and their findings indicate the effect of social stories intervention on improving the skills.
Pragmatic skills — as the key components of social interaction — require the proper development of mind theory. The pragmatic aspects of language and how to learn them are closely related to children's learning of mind theory, especially their mental understanding of intentions and other mental states (Tager-Flusberg, 2000). The theory that can explain the simultaneous occurrence of deficit in socialization, language, and imagination in children with autism is called the theory of mind (Wing & Gould, 1979). Therefore, the inability to develop the theory of mind has been considered as an explanation for the problems of children with autism in social interactions (Baron-Cohen & Weelwright, 2003). It is because of this lack of mental capacity that these children talk about subjects aimlessly, failing to take turns in conversation and maintaining the subject of conversation. They have difficulty in understanding their own and others' mental states and cannot use their communication skills according to the situation.
As a result, in the present study, according to the theory of mind, in designing audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises, perspective sentences have been used to teach the children that the views of others are different from their own views and each behavior causes various feelings in different people. And this is the attention to the theory of mind approach that has been considered in stories and pragmatic exercises.
 
3. Methodology
The statistical population of the present study was all children with ASD in Shahrekord, Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province. The number of final samples (convenient sampling method) was 19 children aged 7 to 9 years who were diagnosed by speech therapists and were selected from three speech therapy centers in Shahrekord in the summer and autumn of 1398. During 18 sessions of 45 to 60 minutes for each subject, which lasted for a maximum period of five months in total, their language and communication performance were examined.
 In this study, three tools were used, the first two, namely audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises as researcher-made tools, and the third one, which is a checklist of children's communication, were used to evaluate the performance of children with disabilities in pre-test and post-test.
Fifteen short audio-visual social stories were prepared, edited, and localized using the principles of social storytelling by Gray (1998). The pragmatic exercises are the second tool with a total of 42 exercises. In each exercise, by defining the objectives of the research, the question was read by the person or by the speech therapist. Then, with the help of the speech therapist the child was allowed to present his/her answer. This questionnaire Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) was initially designed by Bishop (1998) and standardized by Kazemi et al. (2005) for children aged six to eleven years. Its validity and reliability were assessed and an appropriate Persian version of the questionnaire was prepared. This version includes 70 questions with 9 subscales among which 5 subscales are related to pragmatics. To name just a few, we can mention inappropriate initiation, coherence, stereotyped language, use of situational context, and appropriate communication as pragmatic subscales.

 4. Results
The collected data were analyzed using statistical methods using SPSS 19 statistical software. The statistical methods used in the research include the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to examine the natural distribution of data and the dependent t-test to show the difference between the means before and after the intervention. The performance of children with disabilities in pre‑test and post-test was evaluated. The data show that the mean performance of children in a total of 5 subscales related to the pragmatics section of the Bishop communication questionnaire is 114.8 in the pre-test and 120.7 in the post-test and the t-value with 18 degrees of freedom is significant at the level of p <0.05. The mean and standard deviation of the scores of all five subtests from the Bishop communication checklist has increased in the post-test stage compared to the pre-test stage. In other words, this difference was due to the application of the independent variable. In general, analytical statistics indicate a significant difference between pre-test and post-test. The results of the five subscales are shown in the table below:
 

group	Frequency	Mean	t	freedom	significance level
Pre-test	19	114/8	-8/72	18	*0/000
post-test	19	120/7

*p<./.5
 
5. Discussion
The underlying theory of social stories goes back to a defect in the theory of mind, and the purpose of the social story is to improve the social cognition of people with autism and facilitate the creation of a theory of mind by describing specific social conditions of which the person is unaware of. Due to the functional problems of children with ASD and its adverse effect on their social skills, by supporting the functional development of language in a child, it is possible to help develop his/her own language and communication skills. The results from these analyses show that visual and auditory social stories and applied cognitive exercises were effective in improving the verbal and non-verbal communication skills of children with autism, and thus the research hypothesis was confirmed because the difference is statistically significant. These findings are consistent with the findings of Feinberg (2001) and Andre (2004) who acknowledged that social storytelling had a positive effect on the initiation of speech and communication between children with autism and their peers. The results of the study are also in agreement with the studies conducted in Iran, including Bahmanzadegan Jahromi et al. (2008), Golzari and Hemmati (2015), who approved that teaching social skills through social stories led to the reduction of deficit in non‑verbal behaviors, deficit in the maintenance of relationships with others. On the other hand, these stories improved the social behaviors of the children considering the environment and others.
The limitations of the study include the absence of some children during the intervention due to the cost of speech therapy sessions, lack of proper cooperation of government-sponsored centers with the researchers in the field, and lack of cooperation from parents and their families in completing questionnaires and hypersensitivity of their parents in the educational process of their children. In general, due to such limitations, it is suggested that more awareness and information be provided to the families of these children.

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In this study, we have examined the effectiveness of operant conditioning on the
development of linguistic skills in Persian children with autism. It was a quasiexperimental
study, and done by using pre- and post-tests. We randomly selected 40
children (6 girls and 34 boys, 5-10 years old) and divided them into experimental and
control groups comprising of 20 children each. We used the Autism Spectrum Screening
Questionnaire (ASSQ) to screen subjects and the Test of Language Development (TOLDP:
3) to measure their language skills. Both groups received grammatical comprehension
and grammatical completion subtests. Using the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)
method, the experimental group was then subjected to 48 one-hour intervention sessions
ran for 24 weeks. After the intervention, we ran a post-test in both experimental and
control groups. The data were analyzed using SPSS software. In the experimental group,
the mean score in the grammatical completion subtest had increased by 4.2, and in the
grammatical comprehension subset, the mean score had increased by 3.6. In contrast, in
the control group, the mean score of the grammatical completion and comprehension
subtests had increased by 0.25 and 0.3, respectively. The findings suggested that operant
conditioning had direct effects on the improvement of the 5-10 years old Persianspeaking
children with autism.