Abstract
We have been treating a child of four years and eight months old therapeutically. At the outset of the treatment, he could not understand any speech at all, nor did he have any other means of communication such as gesture. During the training process, the child made steady progress in visual, but little progress in auditory tasks. Accordingly, we ventured to teach him first regular letters and then finger letters before teaching him how to speak. By the age of seven years and two months, the child learned to recognize the written forms of many of the words on our picture cards and spell five of them with finger letters. Moreover, he acquired the ability to understand four picture cards by hearing alone and direct his attention to his mother speaking to him. From these details of the training process, we have come to the following conclusions: 1. When auditory and visual stimuli are presented simultaneously, the former interferes with the latter. 2. By acquiring an appropriate means of communication, the child shows increased improvement in his learning behaviour. 3. It may be that the acquisition of visual symbols prompts that of auditory ones, but further study must be made before we can provide a definite answer. 4. The autistic symptoms do not show any remarkable improvement. Therefore we conclude that these symptoms do not come from the inability to understand auditory stimuli and that the child in question is to be diagnosed as a developmental sensory aphasic with autistic syndrome.
