The case of a young girl with developmental word-deafness was reported. Although she uttered jargonic sounds, no meaningful words were heard. Comprehension of spoken language was impossible. Audiometry revealed no hearing defect to account for her delayed speech. Her performance IQ measured by WPPSI was 72 at the age of 6 years and 7 months.
Speech therapy was started at age 5, and Japanese “kana” letters were taught to facilitate visual comprehension of language. Articulatory training was also given. In abbition to visual comprehension, some auditory comprehension was developed after treatment.
We investigated the developmental process with a specifically designed training program, and concluded that disturbed auditory comprehension seemed to be compensated by relatively intact functional systems of the cortex as follows :
1) Speech sounds were discriminatively perceived by oral kinesthetic feed-back.
2) As mediated by visual images of words, individual speech sounds were recognized as components of words.
