Abstract
Cerebral palsied children are considered to have a delay in the development of the concept of body, e. g. body concept, because of their physical disabilities from birth, This is a report of a survey made on 39 lower-grade elementary school children who were all in special schools for the physically handicapped. Each subject was tested and evaluated in order to obtain the developmental level of body concept, the degree of physical disabilities, the past training history, and the vocabulary age (VA).
The main findings are as follows:
a) The development of body concept in the cerebral palsied children is significantly correlated with the development of VA, but not chronological age (CA) nor the degree of physical disabilities,
b) There is a positively significant correlation between the development of body concept and the history of very early training up to one year of age.
c) A survey of 120 normal children (Yuge, 1980) using the same method as this study showed that normal children develop the body concept rapidly from two to three years of age and almost complete its development between the ages of four to five. However, there is no developmental trend observed among the cerebral palsied in regard to their CA nor VA, which may be due to too scattered scores of those variables.
