Abstract
During past fifteen years, operant speech training has been successfully used to teach nonverbal autistic children the skills necessary for language. Results of operant speech training, however, have found weak-points as follows: the lack of response generalization outside the therapy situation and much time-consuming for therapy. Reviwes of current literatures on language training for autistic children indicate the efficacy of sign language training different from speech learning. As a reason of using sign language, autistic children have auditory and auditory-visual association problems which were been demonstrated by experiments in perception and language abilities of the children. Therefore, it has needed to divice the visual language like gestures or visual symbols. The American sign language (for the deaf) and Premack's visual symbol learning were used to teach the children language in current literatures. Successful results have been reported, but it remained the researches of sign learning applied for autistic children and of some psychological factors. The present article suggested that firstly, the weak-points of traditional operant speech training, secondly, the bases of teaching sign language to autistic childreh, thirdly, reviews of current sign language researches and finally, a direction of sign language researches and the point at issues.
