The present study compared the explanatory verbal expressions of children who were presented with still pictures and motion pictures and examined the effectiveness of these visual stimuli for eliciting explanatory expressions. In study 1, typically developing children were assigned three tasks: a still picture task, a motion picture task, and a motion picture followed by a still picture（motion-still condition）task. The verbal descriptions of the situations by the children were compared between these　three tasks. Results showed that motion pictures facilitated understanding of situations, whereas still pictures promoted verbal expression by accessing visual information during speech. The motion-still condition was found to yield verbal output that was rich in content and syntactically more complex, which reflected the individual merits of both the still and motion conditions. In study 2, the still picture and the motionstill picture tasks were assigned to　children with intellectual disabilities, and data were compared with those of study 1. The motion-still picture condition yielded linguistically　richer and more complex verbal output. Furthermore, the children’s understanding of the presented situations was observed to be more appropriate than in the still picture condition. However, the improvements in children with intellectual disabilities were smaller than those in typically developing children. The effectiveness of the combined use of still and motion pictures was discussed.

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We investigated the process of hearing difficulty and self-recognition using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews in four people with moderate hearing loss. We analyzed the result by generating concepts from verbatim reports and classifying those concepts into categories. We found that people had some common characteristics: they became conscious of their hearing loss and had a hatred for their hearing loss as they were unable to communicate with each other. On the other hand, third people provided excuses for their hearing impairment and the associated deficiencies.

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Language acquisition in children with hearing difficulties and multiple disabilities may vary depending on the disabilities in each individual case. We discuss the relationship between cognitive ability and acquired language modalities in the language development process in a child with hearing difficulties and multiple disabilities. We show that language development is improved when speech-language-hearing therapists identify developmental and cognitive characteristics, select appropriate language modalities, and provide instructions while taking into consideration lexical properties.　Furthermore, we suggest that this approach leads to the child’s own ability to develop and use the acquired modality.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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