No more than 40 years have passed since speech clinicians began to treat cerebral palsy (CP). At first, they simply characterized speech pathology for CP as a cooperational motor dysfunction of the speech organs (dysarthria). But after a few decades, speech pathology turned from the specification of proper speech disorders of CP to the integration of communication problems in CP children. As a result, speech pathology viewed CP as a developmental deviation of verbal behavior originating in physical deficiencies from birth. This change in the point of view of speech pathology seems to be related to a trend in neurology in which the concept of developmental disorder is regarded as more adequate than CP for describing a child with multiple handicaps caused by cerebral impairments.
This change also exposed many unsolved problems with respect to speech therapeutic approaches to CP children. For example, these problems included how to estimate their communication disorders from multi-points of view (physiological, semiological, linguistic, pragmatical, etc.), how to undertake diagnosis, and how to propose an adequate remedial program. The other most important and difficult matter is to establish good therapeutic contract with a CP child and his mother, because it is too difficult for both mothers and speech clinicians to integrate communication problems in CP children and to specify the most important communication disorder.
Speech clinicians should not be discouraged by problems in therapy, but should develop a keen insight into children who must live with the physical handicaps they are born with, the families and the communication between the child and the family. This is very difficult, but speech clinicians should try to improve themselves as clinicians.

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In order to investigate the effects of mother tongue on infant vocalization during the prelinguistic stage, a cross-linguistic experiment was done using adult judgements of infant babbling samples in four different languages. The languages were Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and the age levels were 6, 8, 10 months. The experiment used adult listener judgements in which two groups of Japanes adults, expert and non-expert, listened and identified native infant babbling from a combination for the three different age samples.
The following findings were obtained from the study.
1) The total rate of identification on the samples was 73.8%. However, there were rate differences between judgement conditions.
2) The identification rate was low for the Japanese-Korean pair and high for the Japanese-Chinese one.
3) Concerning the age level, both listening groups obtained a high rate of identification at 10 months, but a rate difference was observed on the 8 month sample between the two groups.
These findings suggest that an identifiable language difference in babbling emerges at about 10 months of age in infancy, and that the mother tongue apparently does have an effect on prelinguistic vocalization in infants.

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This study describes measurements and detection tests given to hearing-impaired people with a single vibrator, VIBAR-SUVAG Type 74 R50, which is used with SUVAG apparatus according to the Verbo-tonal Methodology of rehabilitation.
Both physical and perceptive measurements were taken. The frequency-response curve of the vibrator had a small peak around 300Hz and remained flat at a high frequency range. Comparing the amplitude of the speech sound with the one of the vibration from the same sound, very little difference was observed. Therefore, the vibrator keeps its acoustic features when transfering from speech sounds. With the vibrator in the palm of the hand, high frequency tones above about 3000Hz can not be perceived. On the contrary, low frequency tones below about 500Hz can be sensitively perceived. Prosody; i. e. rhythm, in tonation, duration, intensity, etc.; which consists of low frequency elements, is mainly perceived through the vibrator.
Eight trained hearing-impaired people, ages 7-20 years, each with a mean hearing loss above a threshold of 75 dBHL, were tested using only the vibrator without any hearing aids. They correctly detected 48% of ten everyday greeting words and 86% of six sentences including long vowels (“choon”) and/or double consonants (“sokuon”), which are phonological characteristics of Japanese.
These results were obviously high scores. The vibrator and prosodic information are both considered to play an important role in perceiving speech sounds. The vibrator seems to be especially suited for training for long vowel and double consonant sounds which hearing-impaired children can not reproduce clearly.

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According to many reports, the human phonological perception ability is acquired by transfering practical articulatory movements to an inner psychological level. Although this concept is of great importance, its application to aphasic therapy has not been sufficiently studied.
In this study. we fitted a silver spike point (SSP) to 8 aphasics to investigate whether or not it can restore articulatory motor sensation and the ability for phonological production. And we followed one case using the experimental design based on this method.
The results are summarized as follows.
(1) The phonological test scores with SSP increased significantly more than without SSP. The conduction and jargon type patients showed higher rates in comparison with the other two types.
(2) The subject who went through this experiment showed some signs of language improvement. His total score on Standard Language Test of Aphasia (SLTA) increased by 40 per cent over his starting baseline.
Our research indicated that SSP can be used as an effective rehabilitation aid for the phonological improvement in aphasics.

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This paper reports on the cognitive functions of a case with associative visual agnosia following multiple cerebral infarctions. The patient was a 58-year old right handed man. The results of several perceptual and cognitive tests indicated that his apperception was preserved because he could accurately copy line drawings of objects or letters and could correctly match objects. He did not have cognitive disturbances in auditory and tactile modalities. However, in the visual modality he showed cognitive disturbances regardless of whether the stimulus was real objects, line drawings of objects, colors, faces or letters. This means that the patient had object agnosia, color naming disturbance, prospagnosia and alexia without agraphia. His symptoms were also different from optic aphasia, because of his inability to point to an object named by the examiner, to demonstrate how to use objects and to categorize objects. Based on these observations, the patient was considered to be a case of associative visual agnosia.
A medial aspect of the bilateral occipital lobe was identified as a major lesion in the patient. Compared with lesions of associative visual agnosia previously reported, it is a unique feature that the lesion of this patient in the right occipital lobe was relatively small.

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