This is a therapeutic report on a non-verbal boy who could write nearly 30 Japanese hirakana letters when they were orally presented. For one-and-half year, he was given training on breaking down hirakana words into syllables and extracting them. After this training, he seemed to understand the phonological structure of words. In his daily communication, he showed the following: (1) expressing his ideas by putting in sequence these letters of key words; (2) recalling auditory images of ideas into a word and attempting to pronounce each letter of that word. At the same time, he showed some improvement in understanding words and sentences, and in increasing his auditory memory span. Discussion focused upon the function of the syllabification of words in language therapy.

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This study reports a new approach to thematic mapping impairment. A therapeutic program is described which was designed for a non-fluent aphasic who has difficulty in interpreting semantically reversible sentences. The materials consisted of four sentence patterns for one picture: active and passive voice with standard and reversed word order. The task required auditory sentence-picture matching with repetition. He made much more errors in reversed word order sentences, which cannot be comprehended through agent-first strategy. Since the problem lies in the impairment of decoding postposed particles, truncated form which means two-word sentences {NP(noun+particle)+V(verb)} were used in order to focus his attention to one particle at a time. Through composing a full sentence from two truncated sentences and splitting a full sentence off into two truncated sentences, he succeeded in improving syntactic comprehension of reversible sentences. The results indicated that he learned to assign the appropriate thematic roles of nouns to their grammatical roles. The improvement in auditory comprehension of sentences was generalized to the comprehension of those containing untrained main verbs and also to the comprehension of written sentences. Thus therapy designed to achieve accessibility to mapping information proved efficacious.

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The present study investigates articuration therapy combined with a static relaxation technique for children with cerebral palsy, a 12 years old male with moderate mental retardation (case 1), and a 13 years old male (case 2) with profound retardarion. Before their articuration therapy to facilitate the breathing muscles, the larynx muscles, and the muscles around mouth by the static relaxation technique (Seiteki shikan-yudo method: Tachikawa, 1985) was conducted to increased the readiness of the articuration learning. The observed results indicated the improvement of articuration in case 1, and maintenance posture to his voices in case 2. These results suggested that articuration tharapy in combination with the static relaxation technique was effective for children with cerebral palsy accompanied with mental retardation.

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A case of juvenile Parkinsonism with successful rehabilitation for speech articulation was reported here. A fifty-year old male was refered to our clinic because of his asthenic and unclear voice. His phonation was improved when he tried to compulsively control his dyskinetic movement of his lower limbs by hands. A rehabilitation programs including pushing exercise were designed and remarkable improvement in maximum phonation time was observed after this rehabilitation program. Discordination between phonation and respiration was considered to be the major cause of his hypokinetic dysarthria with asthenia.

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A case with Wernicke's aphasia and his wife were treated by “Promoting Information Transmission” therapy (PIT). The case was trained to select and use his more accurate methods when he transmitted to new information to his wife, namely written naming with kanji, drawing, and pointing to items, in his case. His wife was trained to verify appropriately whether her answer was that the patient wanted to transmit. The accuracy of communication was increased from 50% to 70% after 17 sesssions of the PIT.

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