The Japanese Journal of Communication Disorders

This paper describes development of narrative discourse from a four picture comic strip. Expression of plot line in the story by children in three age groups (13 five-year-old children, 13 six-year-old children and 8 nine to ten-year-old children) was analyzed. The story ‘A Chestnut Tree’ presupposed ten basic propositions. At first, each proposition that subjects produced was compared with the ten basic propositions and then the text structures were analyzed. The conjunctive particles were divided into the causal and adversative conjunctions, and whether or not they appeared in the appropriate place was investigated. The result was that the five-year-old children lacked informational content and the six-year-old children produced many unrelated propositions. However, they used conjunctions in the same position as school-aged children and adults when the propositions were arranged in the correct order. Therefore, it was indicated that the preschool children were able to use the conjunctions as cohesion in the text. However, compared with the adults, none of the subjects could use the adversative conjunctions sufficiently well.

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This study examined the relative validity of phonological analysis (mora deletion, sound matching), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual search (cross out speed and accuracy) abilities for predicting fluent text reading and reading comprehension within typically developing Japanese 5th graders (39 in all). Analogous abilities have been identified as important predictors of reading skills in alphabetic languages like English. Given the differences between English and Japanese orthography, it was hypothesized that unique patterns of relationships would be obtained for children reading Japanese. The results demonstrate that mora deletion contributes significantly to speed of oral reading. When mora deletion was excluded from the regression model, RAN (number, hiragana, kanji) also explained variance in oral reading speed. Furthermore, visual search speed predicts accuracy of oral reading. When there is no influence of visual search speed in the regression model, sound matching and kanji RAN are also significantly associated with oral reading accuracy. General knowledge influenced reading comprehension. Based on our previous studies on reading of Japanese kindergartners and first graders, the findings suggest that the predictive power of these measures varies depending on the nature of the reading task and stage of development.

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The article reports a case study about feeding care and training for a child with disabilities, conducted through cooperation between care staff and a speech-language-hearing therapist. Active and self-directed involvement of the staff was important in the persistent practice of feeding training. Concrete and analytic advice from the therapist to staff with problem-solving attitude contributed to active care.

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