Abstract
This is a therapeutic report on a non-verbal boy who could write nearly 30 Japanese hirakana letters when they were orally presented. For one-and-half year, he was given training on breaking down hirakana words into syllables and extracting them. After this training, he seemed to understand the phonological structure of words. In his daily communication, he showed the following: (1) expressing his ideas by putting in sequence these letters of key words; (2) recalling auditory images of ideas into a word and attempting to pronounce each letter of that word. At the same time, he showed some improvement in understanding words and sentences, and in increasing his auditory memory span. Discussion focused upon the function of the syllabification of words in language therapy.
