Studies related to the three naturalistic strategies of communication and language intervention were reviewed in terms of their techniques, effects, theoretical back-grounds, and future directions. The interactive approaches based on the interactive model of language acquisition that stresses the importance of semantic contingency of an adult's response to a child. Despite improved interaction of them and facilitated child's use of already acquired communicative skills, no evidence of child's acquiring new language structures through the approaches is found. Their theoretical basis is required to be examined. The verbal routine based approaches are supported by the findings that routines promote child's communicative initiation and understanding adult's language. Though they are effective in improving targeted communicative skills of a disabled child, their influences on non-targeted skills are not confirmed. Further considerations are requested to how a routine is established. Additinally, investigating how to cooperate these approaches with the interactive approaches is required, because routinaization and semantic contingency are the two ends of a continuum of adult-child interaction. Milieu Teaching uses procedures of applied behavior modification technique. Since this approach has something in common with the above two, their crossing each other is expected to develop new effective naturalistic strategies.

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Parental report data, Japanese Early Communicative Development Inventory, for 21 19-38 months language delayed children and 176 8-16 months normal children at no word or at the single-word stage showed the gesture and language were closely related, especially gestural measures were correlated with language comprehension when controlling for CA. Strong association was found between interpersonal gestures and language production for language delayed children. The children without speech but with substitution play were supposed to have developed symbolic function and have problems in the ability to contorol the speech production system. It is important to assess symbolic function underlying gestural and language development for language delayed children to find the clues for deficit in speech.

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A 62-years-old female with mild conduction aphasia was studied for the purpose of controlling phonemic paraphasia. Her speech, characterized by phonemic paraphasia, showed a remarkable deterioration as the number of syllables in a word increased. In order to control this problem, Kana transcription was used. Picturable words and abstract Kanji words exceeding 5 syllables were chosen. The program included three steps: (1) to count the number of mora in a word and put circles as many as the mora, (2) to write Kana one by one in the circles, (3) to read the word aloud with a finger tapping each circle rhythmically. The results of the confrontation naming showed that this Kana transcription program was much more effective comparing with repetition program, and the performance of non-treated words remained low. Applying this program to reading aloud of Kanji words, the same effect was obtained. Since the underlying mechanism of the phonemic paraphasia is the deficit of phonemic selection and seriation, Kana transcription procedure activated this phonological processing system and clarified the acoustic form of a target word present but seems to be unstable.

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