Meaningful Words and Non-Words Repetitive Articulatory Rate (Oral Diadochokinesis) in Persian Speaking Children

Repetitive articulatory rate or Oral Diadochokinesis (oral-DDK) shows a guideline for appraisal and diagnosis of subjects with oral-motor disorder. Traditionally, meaningless words repetition has been utilized in this task and preschool children have challenges with them. Therefore, we aimed to determine some meaningful words in order to test oral-DDK in Persian speaking preschool children. Participants were 142 normally developing children, (age range 4–6 years), who were asked to produce /motaeka, golabi/ as two meaningful Persian words and /pa-ta-ka/ as non-word in conventional oral-DDK task. We compared the time taken for 10-times fast repetitions of two meaningful Persian words and the tri-syllabic nonsense word /pa-ta-ka/. Praat software was used to calculate the average time that subjects took to produce the target items. In 4–5 year old children, \(\hbox {mean}\pm \hbox {SD}\) of time taken for 10-times repetitions of /pa-ta-ka, motaeka, golabi/ were \(7.72\pm 1.02, 6.58\pm 1.68\), and \(6.65\pm 1.13\) seconds respectively, and in 5–6 year old children were \(7.57\pm 0.95, 6.35\pm 1.38\), and \(6.30\pm 1.01\) seconds respectively. Findings showed that the main effect of type of words on oral diadochokinesis was significant (\({p}\,{<}\,0.001\)). Children repeated meaningful words /motaeka, golabi/ faster than the non-word /pa-ta-ka/. Sex and age factors had no effect on time taken for repetition of oral-DDK test. It is suggested that Speech Therapists can use meaningful words to facilitate oral-DDK test for children.