Objective: The present study was designed to investigate language development in children with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Materials & Methods: In this comparative and case–control research, 30 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 30 healthy matched children were selected simply and conveniently from the elementary first grade students of Qazvin city. Data collection tools included: test of language development– primary: 3th edition (TOLD-P:3), Connors’ rating scale – teachers form, and Raven color matrices. Data were analyzed by repeated measure analysis of variance.

Results: There was significant difference in profile of language development between ADHD children and healthy children (P<0.001), but there were no significant differences between boys and girls in both case group (P=0.254) and control group (P=1.00). The results of multivariate analysis showed that the ADHD children were significantly lower in some aspects of language development skills including picture vocabulary, relative vocabulary, oral vocabulary, grammatical understanding, grammatical completion, word discrimination, listening, organizing, speaking, semantics and syntax. No significant difference was found in sentence imitation, phonemic analysis and word articulation.

Conclusion: The attention deficit hyperactivity disorder children have some problems in many but not all aspects of language development.