The Toy Talk（TT）method was developed to increase the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parents’ input in order to accelerate their children’s grammatical development. Our study examined whether this type of training can enhance sentence diversity among Japanese mothers and whether mother-implemented intervention can improve the language performance of their two-to four-year-old　children with language problems. The mothers received individual TT instruction on language modeling strategies, such as（a）talking about the toys that her child plays with, and（b）using sentences with a verb indicating movement, for 60 minutes once a month for about three months. The Japanese version of the TT method requires mothers to　focus on verbs rather than nouns because Japanese signals and diverse sentences are based on verbs. Following the TT instruction, the mothers and their children displayed increased sentence diversity in their　utterances within a short period, indicating that TT can change parents’ input and enhance their children’s sentence development. We discuss the clinical implications and future research directions.

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Individuals with Down syndrome（DS）frequently show poor intelligibility of speech. Ishida（1999）reported that their word intelligibility is more reduced than expected by that of monosyllables. Therefore, we assessed tongue movements during speech production through vocal acoustic analysis and auditory impressions in individuals with DS. Voices pronounced by 7 individuals with DS and 10 normal adults were acoustically compared between using a simple vowel（/i/, /o/, /a/） or compound vowels（/io/, /oi/, /ao/, /oa/）in Japanese words. As a result, the transitions of the second formant（F2）between /i/ and /o/ for compound vowels in DS were significantly decreased compared to those in normal adults. This result suggests limited articulation in individuals with DS, especially horizontal movement of the tongue, when they utter continuous vowels. This may be related to the poor intelligibility of their words.

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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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