Abstract
In spite of the patients' recognition of retarded speech, the patient' s severe hearing impairment was not diangnosed until she was five years of age.
Intensive acoupedic training was conducted for three years. The analysis of syntactic development was made based on speech data obtained between 7 and 9 years of age.
For comparison, similar data taken from another hard of hearing sample which had begun a systematic acoupedic training from an early age.
The main results were as follows:
1) Even though intensive acoupedic training was conducted, once the hard of hearing child passed the period of optimal language acquisition, very limited syntactic development was observed compared with the level reached by a normal hearing child.
2) Frequency of the use of incomplete sentences during speech was remarkably high: about one half of all spoken sentences in the 9th year evaluation were incomplete.
3) Lack of function words or predicate sentences, and misuse of the meaning of words characterized this patient's speech. Relatively frequent inversion of sentences was another characteristic. It was very difficult for her to aquire function words, conjunctions, and adverbs.
4) The patient's difficulty in acquisition of abstract concepts was found to be the same as that seen in the hard of hearing child whose training started much earlier.
