1982 年 23 巻 2 号 p. 132-140
A home training program for language education was conducted on a young girl with severe hearing impairment over 90 dB who was born to deaf parents. She began to wear a hearing aid at the age of twelve months, while the training started when she was eighteen months old. A combined method of manual and oral communication was adopted for the language education because manual communication was used among members of the family in daily life. The girl began to learn manual communication and speech reading mainly through her parents. She began to express two-word sentences at the age of 25 months and multiword sentences at the age of 36 months using manual communication accompanied by spoken words. Consequently, she became able to communicate fluently with her deaf parents.
The case reported here suggests that the combined method of manual and oral communication as tried in our clinic is very effective for language education of a deaf infant born to deaf parents, if the parents have enough language.