Nowadays, there is an increasing tendency in delinquency of preadolescent children. The energy spent to prevent delinquency is to control the particular environmental conditions which are considered to lead to delinquency.
The first purposse of this study was to find out the dimensions of such environmental factors by means of comparative studies on problem and nonproblem children.
The subjects were 513 5th grade boys in a city of Osaka Pref. They passed a questionnaire about their attitudes toward their school, classroom teacher, friends, parents, leisure, and so on. Based on the classroom teacher's evaluation on the pupils' behavioral traits, subjects were divided into problem and non-problem groups. The problem group (70 boys) and the non-problem group (42 boys) were compared through their responses to the questionnaire. Consequently, 23 items were found significant between the two groups. Through the factor analysis, using 23 items, 4 factors were abstracted, and each of them was named as follows: school adjustment-maladjustment, emotional conflict between parent-child relationship, leniency-severity by the father, and thrilling play. It was found that these were the very dimensions of environmental conditions leading to delinquency.
The second purpose was the classification of typical problem children by applying Hayashi's quantification III. Using the above 23 significant items and 57 categories, 17 typical problem children were classified into five classes. And it was suggested that each class represented the degree of potential delinquency.

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A stratified adaptive test of verbal ability has been built by use of 280 vocabulary items with known parameters. The test was designed to measure ability in broad range. Administrations of the test and an additional questionnaire on the test indicate that the test was appropriate for 6th graders through graduate students. An ability score of each subject was estimated by the maximum likelihood method. An information curve for the set of items answered by each subject showed that appropriate items were selected for the subject. The curve of the amount of information has maximum value at the neighborhood of the estimated level of his ability.
All these results demonstrated that this stratified adaptive test could be used for measuring broad range of verbal ability.

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The present paper describes the way a child learns how to put given speech sounds into Japanese phonemic letters (hiragana). The subject, N, is an 11-year-old boy and attends school for mentally retarded children. He has difficulty in communicating with others, especially in expression rather than in reception. He had already learned to write several single letters each of which corresponds to one-syllable sound when the following experiment was started.
In Experiment I, N was required to write two letters, receiving a two-syllable sound which consisted of letters he had learned. He was given three lists of sounds each of which included twelve two-syllable sounds. The result showed that though N could write a single letter corresponding to a one-syllable sound did not guarantee he could do so when he was given a two-syllable sound.
In Experiment I-(a)-(d), he was required to match picture cards with letter cards (a), to choose the letter cards equivalent to the speech sounds he received (b), to tell the names of the pictures on the cards (c) and to read the words on the cards (d). The words used were the same in Experiment I. He could perform only a few, of the above four experiments.
In Experiment II, it was investigated whether N could write two letters corresponding to a given two-syllable sound after he had learned he had failed in both Experiment I-(a) and (c). He could perform the task completely.
Next, it was examined whether he could write letters with a two-syllable sound while being told his failure in Experiment I-(a)(Experiment III) and in Experiment I-(c)(Experiment IV) respectively. In Experiment III, he responded approximately 70 percent correctly and in Experiment IV, he made no correct answers. The items used were twelve words (one list) in Experiments II, III and IV.
These results showed that the learning in Experiment II was indispensable in order to write two letters corresponding to the sounds. But as N had difficulty in telling the name of the pictures, he needed to be given a different kind of learning procedure. In Experiment V, N was required to read two letters (a word) on a separately given card, then, to choose a picture card equivalent to them, and in addition, to make correspondence between the picture card and the letter card. The items used were twelve new words. With this learning, N was able to write two letters completely, receiving a two-syllable sound. This learning procedure was found to be more useful to him than the one described in Experiment II.

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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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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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