Comparing Rapid Naming Skill in 7- and 8-Year-Old Normally Developed Children in Tehran

Objective Rapid naming is the ability of an individual to understand a visual symbol and retrieve it rapidly and accurately. When a person is naming, he/she may make a mistake or correct her/his mistake. Rapid naming tasks are the best tools for screening, assessment and early prevention of issues in this area. The rapid naming is important in reading skills, and there is a lack of basic information about rapid naming in Persian speaking children; thus, this study investigated the relationship between this skill, and age and gender, and compared the number of errors and self-correction in the 7- and 8-year-old age groups. Materials & Methods This cross-sectional and causal-comparative study was conducted on 203 normal male and female students in Autumn 2015 for 4 months. The study participants were selected using a multistage sampling method from 5 geographic regions (north, south, east, west, center) of Tehran City, Iran. The students had no hearing impairment, intelligence, learning, and visual deficiency. They enjoyed the natural growth of language and verbal fluency. Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and Rapid Alternating Stimulus (RAS) tasks were performed. The children's voices were recorded during the test implementation; when we were listening to the recorded voices, the naming time of each task was separately measured and recorded using a stopwatch. In addition to naming time, the number of errors and self-correction were counted. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to investigate the relationship between naming speed and age. This test was also used to determine the relationship between naming speed and gender. The relationship between the number of errors and self-correction and age were analyzed by the Chi-squared test. Results The MANOVA results revealed a significant difference in the mean scores of the naming time between the two age groups (f(6, 196)=9.395, P0.05). Moreov