In Persian, like many other languages, there are three Voices, passive, active and middle. In Persian, middle Voice, like passive Voice, is a structure consisting of a one-place predicate. Middle verbs are morphologically active and semantically passive. The purpose of this article is to describe the properties of middle construction in Persian and to explore the derivation of middle as a transitive structure within the framework of the latest version of Generative Grammar.

People with Parkinson's disease (PD) often have walking difficulty in the advanced stages of the disease and also suffer from balance problems. They perform their functional movements in a smaller range and at a slower rate, which will cause difficulty in performing daily activities. Patients with PD face many difficulties in outdoor activities, community participation, personal tasks, and fine motor skills (e. g. writing). They usually need the help of others. For two decades, a new treatment called Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT) has been used by the speech therapists to treat speech and swallowing disorders in PD patients based on evidence and principles of neuroplasticity. The BIG protocol was added to this method in 2010 (LSVT-BIG). In this method, the whole body is involved and its main focus is on motor skills, which are guided by a physiotherapist and occupational therapist. The main goal of this new method is to improve patient’ s skilled movement in PD, as opposed to the old methods that introduce muscle stiffness as the main problem in these patients. In this method, patients will be required to perform a series of special exercises in sitting and standing positions in a larger range than usual with a specific schedule and in a one-month intensive period. Doing the BIG protocol correctly can make the range of motion softer and larger. The studies also show that the LSVT BIG method is very effective for improving patients' walking patterns and daily activities and significantly increases the quality of life in PD patients. Eventually, the PD patients will be able to perform their motor tasks automatically. Considering the useful results of this method and also the growing trend of its application around the world, it is necessary to enable therapists with this new method and provide more complete services for PD patients.

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to quantify the Voice disorders in children with cochlear implantation and hearing aids. Until now, quantifying Voice disorders has been done subjectively by speech experts and it is for the first time that the preset study tends to run an objective experiment  using signal processing features. Materials and Methods: 4 levels were considered to be qualify speech. Linear and nonlinear features were extracted from 5 Farsi words: “mashin”, “mar”, “moosh”, “gav” and “mowz” uttered by 30 subjects and then put into hidden Markov classifiers. Classifier outputs then were fused together to have better accuracy. The main hypothesis of the study is to answer this question: Can we separate children into 4 levels based on their Voice features? Voice features including “fundamental frequency, first formant, second formant, third formant, first to second formant ratio, third to second formant ratio, Rational Intensity, nasality, approximate entropy and fractal dimension were extracted from speech segments and then are were given to artificial decision making systems (classifiers).Results: The results show that classifiers can separate 4 levels of Voice disorders with the accuracy of 93.1%. Among the introduced features, first to second formant ratio and third to second formant ratio can be used directly to track Voice recovery after using cochlear implantation or hearing aid.Conclusion: The output of this research study can act as a speaker independent system to help speech specialists with evaluating Voice disorder recovery in children who fall in the same range of age.

Background and Aim: Teachers are a large group of professional Voice users that several risk factors and Voice demands causes various Voice complaints among them. As the Voice is multidimensional, the aim of this study was acoustic and perceptual measurement of teachers’ Voice and comparing the findings between two groups with many and few Voice complaints.Methods: Sixty female teachers of high school in Sari, north of Iran, were chosen by available sampling to participate in this cross-sectional study. According to a Voice complaints questionnaire, 21 subjects located in few Voice complaints and 31 in many Voice complaints group. After a working day, subjects completed a Voice self-assessment questionnaire. Also, teachers’Voice were recorded during three tasks including sustained vowels /a/ and /i/, text reading and conversational speech. Acoustic parameters were analyzed by Praat software and 2 speech-language pathalogists performed auditoryperceptual assessment by GRBAS (Grade, Roughness, Breathiness, Asthenia, Strain) scale.Results: Comparing of the Voice self-assessment between the two groups demonstrated statistically significant difference (p<0.05); however results of the acoustic and auditory-perceptual measurement did not show significant diffrence.Conclusion: Despite prevalent Voice problems in teachers, there are various conditions in terms of complaints and assessments methods. In this study, only a remarkable deviation documented in the client-based assessments in many Voice compliants group in comparison with few Voice compliants, which would be probably related to different individual’s perception of Voice problem between two groups. These results support paying attention to self-assessments in clinical process of Voice problems.

Background: Teachers, as professional Voice users, are at high risk of Voice disorders. The greater their dependency on Voice as a means of social and professional satisfaction, the worse the effects of Voice disorders on the quality of their lives. Voice complaints may have a great impact on the quality of teachers’ lives. There are no self-appraisal protocols for teachers' quality of life. Therefore, little is known about how valid the Persian version of VHI and V-RQOL scales are. It is also unknown which of the aforementioned scales best describes the effect of Voice disorder on the population under investigation. As such, it is important to know to what extent the aforementioned scales correlate with each other. Therefore, the aim of this study was to calculate the correlation between total scores of the Persian versions of VHI and V-RQOL scales administered to teachers with Voice disorders.Method and Materials: This study was a cross-sectional descriptive-analytical one. The participants were 32 female primary teachers with Voice disorders recruited through available sampling. In order to confirm that the participants suffer from Voice disorders, they were asked to express the sound /a/ with their habitual pitch and loudness for a period of 7 seconds. Sound samples were recorded, while environmental noise was controlled (less than 50 dB). In the next step, the acoustic parameters (F0, SD F0, NNE, HNR, Shimmer and Jitter) were investigated in a 5 second interval of recorded sound using Praat software. If the values of the acoustic parameters were higher than normal, the sample was judged as abnormal. Then the teachers with a disordered Voice sample were asked to read and complete the Persian version of the VHI and V-RQOL forms carefully. The normality of data distribution was tested by using Shapiro-Wilkes test and the correlation between the total score of the two questionnaires was assessed by Pearson's correlation test.Results: Shapiro-Wilkes test showed that the data was normally distributed. The correlation between the total score of VHI and V-RQOL was assessed using Pearson's correlation test. The results revealed a significant correlation between the overall scores of the participants on VHI and V-RQOL scales (r=-0.876, p<0.001). As the correlation was negative, it can be concluded that the higher the participants’ scores on the Voice Handicap Index, the lower their scores on Voice-Related Quality of Life scale.Conclusion: Since a significant negative correlation exists between the scores gained by teachers with Voice disorders on the VHI and V-RQOL questionnaires, it is concluded that both questionnaires measure the same feature (Voice related quality of life). So, it is suggested that experts in clinical practice should use either of the two scales as they wish. In other words, there is no need to use both of them.

Background and Objectives: Voice is an important communication tool of human and larynx is the organ of making Voice. Vocal cord nodules are usually seen in those persons who abuse there Voice. The aim of this study was to compare the surgical technique and speech-therapy on Voice healthing in patient with laryngeal nodules.Materials and Methods: In this study 60 Patients with the diagnosis of vocal cord nodules were divided in two groups. First group were treated by speech therapy and surgical microscopic excision applied in other group. Results were compared 3 months after completing each modalities.Results: From a total number of 60 patients (M/f–36/24), there were 30 patients (M/F 18/12 mean age 38.3±9.1) in surgical group and 30 patients (M/F 18/12 mean age 37.1±8.71) in Voice therapy group. There were no significant differences between the quality of Voice in these two group, (P=0.22), the size of laryngeal nodule had a positive correlation with the degree of Voice change.Conclusion: The study showed that there is no difference between surgical methods and speech therapy modalities for treatment of laryngeal nodules.