Among hearing-impaired children receiving auditory training at our clinic, self-injury and stereotypy such as head banging, hair plucking and grinding were seen in 13 of 110 cases. In almost every case, these behaviours began to occur from 6 to 12 months of age and were observed in hearing-impaired children having other impairments, especially optic disorder, rather than those having hearing impairment only. These behaviours disappeared or decreased in patients using hearing aids. Therefore, it was thought that hearing aids should be used even in hearing-impaired children who have developmental disabilities that would prevent them from acquiring speech. It was presumed that these behaviours are caused by alienation of mother-infant interaction. If these behaviours are checked at the 1-year-6-month-old health examination, we may be able to detect infants with hearing impairments.

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Language retardation in infants has been considered from two aspects: neurologically and developmentally.
Language development is assumed to be composed of four modalities : hearing, speaking, seeing and writing. Planning of speech therapy tasks requires developmental scales of these four language modalities.
The author prepared developmental charts of the four language modalities. However, visual developmental scales for one-and-a-half to four-year-old children are not found so often as auditory developmental scales. In this report, the author attempted to devise several visual scales for this period. Thirty-two normal children were examined, and six scales were found in their abilities.
Ordinary articles and toys were used in the examinations: for example, shoes, a pencil, a toothbrush and a puzzle toy. The scales were as follows.
(1) 2 years old : a. Matching of at least six of seven items or figures to their corresponding drawings. b. Matching of at least six of ten pictures to their corresponding drawings.
(2) 2 years and 4 months: a. Matching of at least nine of ten pictures to their corresponding drawings. b. Ability to insert at least six of ten cubical figures into the puzzle box when one side is presented.
(3) 2 years and 7 months: Matching of at least seven of 14 kana letters figures to their corresponding drawings.
(4) 3 years and 1 month: Matching of all 14 kana letters to their corresponding drawings.
(5) 3 years and 7 months: Reading of at least one of 14 kana letters.
(6) 3 years and 9 months : Ability to insert at least nine of ten cubical figures into the puzzle box.

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The present paper reports details of the development of auditory functions and language before and after cochlear implantation in two young children with congenital deafness.
The first case was a boy. When he was one year and six months old, he was given a hearing aid and received auditory training at a rehabilitation center. In spite of efforts to achieve maximal use of the hearing aid, no amplification effect was observed. When he was two years and nine months old, he visited our clinic and was diagnosed as having total deafness above 130 dB. He was enrolled in our home training program. In order to facilitate the development of communication skills as well as language, manual communication including cued speech, finger spelling and gestures was recommended for use between the child and his parents and teachers. This approach was successful, and he soon began to acquire language through vision. When the boy reached four years of age, he received a cochlear implant (Nucleus 22channel device) in the right ear, but subsequent development of auditory functions was very slow and limited. When the boy was four years and ten months old, the author introduced a top-down method based on a neuropsy-chological hypothesis in order to facilitate the development of auditory analytic-synthetic functions in the brain. The child was shown characters or written words which he already knew, and he was asked to imitate the author's pronounciation of these teaching materials. By means of this method, he gradually came to understand spoken words mainly through audition.
The second case was a girl. At the age of one year and nine months, she was diagnosed as having profound hearing loss. She was immediately enrolled in our home training program, in which she was given a body-worn hearing aid. After finishing the program, she was referred to a school for the deaf, where she received auditory training and language education by auditory-oral method. According to her mother's statement, the girl never responded to environmental noises except for the sound of a drum. When she was four years and five months old, she visited our clinic again because of the poverty of her auditory response. Audiometry demonstrated that she had extremely profound hearing loss above 130 dB but retained minimal residual hearing in the low frequency range of the left ear. She received implant surgery in the right ear at the age of five years and six months. Her postoperative development of auditory functions was clearly better than that of the first case, even though her age at implantation was higher than that of the first case.
The findings obtained from these two cases suggest that early auditory experiences before cochlear implantation may positively influence the effect of a cochlear implant. They further imply that careful use of manual communication prior to cochlear implantation does not necessarily interfere with postoperative development of auditory perceptual functions.

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This study was designed to investigate which environmental factors influence onset of stuttering. Data were obtained for 885 three-year-old children through their parents, using questions on paper. Questions consisted of two scales for measuring the parent-child semantic relationship and the degree of child disfluency.
According to factor analysis, three factors-dominance, over-protection and acceptance were observed using the parent-child semantic relationship scale. We classfied the subjects into three groups (stuttering, high risk, nonstuttering) according to degree of disfluency, and compared the parent-child semantic relationship across the three groups. Results showed that for the two factors of dominance and over-protection, the higher the degree of disfluency, the higher were both factor levels. However, for the acceptance factor, no clear tendency was found across the three groups.
We concluded that when parents work on their children's speech with a dominant and over-protecting attitude, and fail to listen to their children talk, the degree of child disfluency increases.As a result, parents' attitude toward their children's speech becomes more dominant and over-protective, which brings on stuttering. Therefore, early intervention in the parent-child semantic relationship will work as a prevention for onset of stuttering.

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Colic crying is dearly one cause of child abuse. To study the psychological relationship between colic and child abuse, we employed subjective evaluation and objective sound analysis. To measure subjective evaluation we employed multi dimensional scaling (MD) with seven grades (from-3 to+3) . Items consisted of feelings, such as [unpleasantpleasant], [hateful dear] and [anger causing-desire to caress] . For objective testing we examined narrow band spectrogram (NBS), fundamental frequency (FF) and sound waves (SW) by Mac Speech Lab II. The interior of the subjective evaluation was observed using objective measurement.
Colic cries were collected from two male babies each one-month old and played back for ten seconds by SoundScope/16 2.7 (MacLab II) to evaluators. The average points of both cries were-25 for [unpleasantpleasant], -4.5 for [hateful dear] and-4 for [anger causing-desire to caress] .
The unpleasant feelings occurred in both when SW was at maximum at the start of crying, and during inharmonious configurations of NBS. Hateful and anger causing were felt from continuous unpleasant sounds.

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This study investigated the difference in acquisition of speech sounds between children with cleft palate who exhibit palatalized articulation as a type of misarticulation and those who exhibit normal speech, with a focus on phonological processes. A single word articulation test was periodically administered throughout the speech acquisition period (2-5 years) to 20 children with cleft palate accompanied by palatalized articulation. The same test was also administered to a control group of 20 children with cleft palate who acquired normal speech without speech remediation.Both speech samples were analyzed based on 14 phonological processes. Results indicated that (1) in the experimental group the number of articulation errors was higher and the frequency of the processes was lower than in the control group ; (2) the children in the experimental group exhibited backing more frequently and palatalization less frequently than children in the control group. These results suggest that in postoperative speech follow-up, children who exhibit backing and produce many error sounds which are not categorized in phonological processes are at high risk of developing palatalized articulation.

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In passerine birds, song is a learned behavior used by males to attract females. Generally, a song is composed of several types of song notes and the order of these notes is stereotyped. However, unlike most songbirds studied to date, Bengalese finches sing non-deterministic songs that may be described by a finite-state syntax. Why do Bengalese finches sing such complex songs? First, to answer from the mechanical point of view, we found that the finite-state syntax is expressed in hierarchically organized brain nuclei in this species. Next, to answer from the functional point of view, we were able to show that a song with syntax is more attractive to female birds, and therefore the song syntax in Bengalese finches may have evolved through sexual selection. Furthermore, to answer from the evolutionary point of view, we found that song syntax was absent in the ancestor species of the Bengalese finch yet females of the ancestor species preferred syntactically complex songs. Based on these results, we discuss the evolution of complex behavior and associated changes in the brain.Through these considerations, we hope to propose a hypothesis on the origin of human language.

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The‹S-S Method›is a comprehensive language assessment and intervention program. Its characteristics are as follows. (1) When designing intervention strategies and procedures, three dimensions of language behavior-the sign-significate relations, communication attitude, and basic processes that support language behavior-have to be consid-ered. (2) The objectives and course of the training program are determined according to the results of the ‹S-S Method› assessment. (3) Some small steps are available for connecting signs with concepts of objects and situations. In this article, a program for facilitating development of language comprehension and an elementary question-answer intervention approach were described. Linguistic concepts such as “motivation-arbitrariness”, “distin-ctiveness”, “syntagmatic-paradigmatic”were suggested by use of the program. Moreover, some clinical findings on level of language comprehension and skill in speech production, were described.

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Seven cases (7 to 12 years of age, 6 males and 1 female) of developmental dyslexics with normal intelligence and without marked speech or language problems were given a battery of tests consisting of seven items, covering phonology, semantics, syntax and verbal memory. The results were compared to those for non-reading-retarded children matched to each subject's school grade.
It was found that: (1) each subject's results for test items measuring phonological awareness (word reversals and mora-counting) were far below results (-1 SD) of the control group; (2) each subject's results for test items measuring semantic comprehension (answer-ing riddles) were within the normal limit; (3) confrontation naming of objects, colors and actions showed a categorical effect which was not observed among the controls; (4) comparison of the results for the two kinds of word retrieval tasks (first, retrieving words that begin with a certain mora-sound, like /ka/; second, retrieving words that belong to a certain category of meaning, like 'animal') showed a discrepancy in the number of words retrieved in the two tasks, that is, the number of words with a mora-sound retrieved was inferior to that of words with a categorical meaning, and such discrepancy was not observed among the controls.
Results (1) and (4) mentioned above indicated that the seven dyslexic subjects had a developmental delay in phonology. The relationship between reading and phonological development has been confirmed among normal and dyslexic children in English and other languages. The results of this study indicated that development of phonology plays an important role in learning Hiragana as well.

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We compared the development of linguistic and non-linguistic abilities in children with specific language impairment (SLI) from the point of view of cognitive-neuropsychological structure. The SLI children demonstrated normal abilities in reading aloud and repetition but revealed a disorder in understanding of meaning. Although they show a disorder in understanding of linguistic meaning, their development of non-linguistic meaning is normal. This contrasts with cases of learning disabilitied (LD) children who manifest specific Kanji writing disorder and show cognitive disorders in both linguistic and non-linguistic capacities. These results suggest that linguistic and non-linguistic semantic abilities are prone to develop separately in SLI children.

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This study investigated the development of communication competence in children with moderate-severe mental retardation. The subjects were first encountered by the author prior to 4 years of age and seen regularly beyond 8 years of age, without intensive speech therapy. A comparison of communication competence was made at 4 and 8 years old. There were 24 children in the severe group and 25 in the moderate group. The result was that 24 children in the moderate group acquired verbal communication, with 15 able to have a functional conversation. On the other hand, only 16 children in the severe group acquired verbal communication. The children with speaking ability became able to control their panic impulsions. The severely retarded but verbal children showed improvements in speaking or vocal imitation during later school ages. These result show the importance of following such cases and offering long-term support to both children and mothers. Although retarded children have typically shown very small improvements and it is difficult to recognize developmental changes through standardized tests, we have been able to see gradual development.Therefore, when studying the effects of intensive speech therapy using programmed speech therapy techniques, we should consider the subject's intrinsic ability to communicate.

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