Abstract
The purpose of present study was to investigate the understanding of vocabulary in the word classification task and the word comprehension task in hearing impaired children. Subjects were 123 hearing impaired children, aged from 9 to 16 and 119 hearing children, aged from 6 to 12. Subjects were asked to choice a correct item among items. This experiment consisted of two tasks; word classification and word comprehension. In the word classification task, the hearing impaired were inferior to the hearing in correct response. Also, in the word comprehension task, the hearing impaired were inferior to the hearing. In examining the performance of the word classification basing on the perfomance of the word comprehension, both the hearing impaired and the hearing decreased the response based on the form and the number of HIRAGANA and increased the response based on the meaningful selection among the items. These results were suggested that the poor in vocabulary did not understand the correct meaning of the word but tend to depend on the form of the word. In the further teaching language, the teacher should enrich the foundation of the language, at the sam time, expand the vocabulary noticing the meaningful function among the words.
