Abstract
A three-year-old girl with delayed speech received an intervention as to her irrelevant use of words in giving and taking. Before the intervention, she would give and take without saying a word or irrelevant words, such as “Choudai, hai” (Give me, look) in giving, and “Dozo, arigatou” (Look, thank you) in taking. In the intervention she was requested to use dolls as giver and taker imitating modeled speech of adult. Through initial manual guidance she could use dolls. It helped her conceptualize giving and taking she could then relate words to those acts relevantly. However she would express no intent by words, representing only the acts themselves. In the end she would say “Arigatou” both as giver and taker, representing her partner's taking and her own taking. Her irrelevant word use was the result of adopting representative function of language with no consideration of actor-utterance relation. Further investigation would be requested to clarify the reason why she could not relate them relevantly.
