Abstract
This paper reports on group therapy for early habilitation in Down's syndrome children, cognitive and language development of 4 patients who were treated in the same group at the same place, and prespeech training.
The results were as follows: (1) Normal infants acquires prespeech behavior before age two, but Down's syndrome children required three years. (2) Compared with their speech recognition, the development of speech expression was delayed and indivudual differences were great. (3) Even if they had speech in their daily lives, they were not able to use it for demands and responses. They had to depend upon body language for a long time. (4) Before they could understand something's name in a picture, they had to be able to match a picture to another picture.
These results suggest the following: During the prespeech training, the most important task was to let Down's syndrome children acquire basic behavior, which consists of attention to objects, common use of objects, exchange of objects with other people, step by step. Usually, ordinary children gain these skills by two years of age. Consequently we should adopt visual matching and gestures in prespeech training, and use the merits of group therapy.
