Abstract
Sixteen hard of hearing children of two to four years old, whose hearing losses are between 50 to 85 dB, were educated by Acoupedic Approach. Six and ten of them were treated during 1964 and during 1965-1967 respectively.
The children of 1964 were encouraged to speak spontaneously even in early days of the education, whereas for the children of 1965-1967 the educational program for their spontaneous language expression was postponed to the time after the program for recognition and discrimination of sounds was treated enough.
The results are as follows:
(1) The total number of words spontaneously used decreases according to the severity of hearing impairment. This result is confirmed with both groups of the subjects.
(2) With the progress of the education, the total number of words increases more rapidly for the children of 1964 than that of the children of 1965-1967 does. When the spontaneous expression is encouraged, the development of language is accelerated as far as in the total number of words in vocabularies.
However, the analysis of classification of words used by both groups reveals that their vocabularies consist of much of nouns and less of verbs compared with that of a normal child. This result seems to lead a further improvement of the educational method in future.
(3) The order of occurence of words used by the children tends to be analogous to that of normal children.
