The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between phonological awareness of Japanese long vowels and the ability to accurately spell familiar words containing long vowels. The subjects were forty-nine normal children (chronological age or CA, 4:05 to 7:06; vocabulary age or VA, 4:02 to 12:00) and thirty-one developmentally handicapped children (CA, 7:03 to 15:01; VA, 2:01 to 12:00). The results of the study were as follows. For normal children, phonological awareness of long vowels increased with their age. There was, however, no statistically significant difference between age groups regarding correct responses when writing the words. Subjects up to the first grade did seem to realize, however, that there should be someway of indicating the difference between long and short vowels but could not make the correct response. For the developmentally handicapped children, phonological awareness did not increase with increases in their VA.

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This study examines the use of Promoting Information Transmission (PIT) therapy to improve the level of communication between a man with Broca's aphasia and his wife. After thirteen sessions of PIT therapy, the level of accuracy in communication between the couple increased from 55% to 87%.

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This study reports on improvement in articulation in a mentally retarded nine-year old boy with autistic symptoms. Initially, the boy would not initiate speech but would only parrot back what was said to him. Since the consonants he produced consisted mostly of glottal stop sounds, we adopted systematic articulation therapy. This resulted in an improvement in articulation and in the boy participating in simple, every day conversations. We speculate here that giving attention to cognitive factors may contribute to articulation improvement when giving articulation training to patients with autistic symptoms. This study also indicates that articulation therapy may result in the improvement of conversational ability.

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This study discusses pathological changes seen in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD), representative types of dementia. The cardinal pathological changes in AD consist of neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques. In regards to VaD, the pathological changes in the brain in BD (which is a typical example of VaD) indicate that lacunae and subcortical white matter changes result from small vessel disease. For the purpose of research and treatment of patients suffering from such forms of dementia, diagnostic criteria are needed in order to standardize clinical and pathological diagnoses. Problems in establishing such diagnostic criteria are discussed. In addition, various vascular lesions complicating AD and BD were shown to aggravate cognitive and neurological functions.

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