It is well known that language disorder is one of the most important defects of autistic children. The purpose of this study is to analyze their language disorder from the neurolinguistical point of view based on A.R. Luria, who described two types of aphasia, dynamic and semantic, that have features opposing to each other. According to Luria, the patient of dynamic aphasia shows great difficulty in recalling verbs and constructing a sentence and the patient of semantic aphasia shows great difficulty in recalling nouns and understanding logico-grammatical structures. In this study, we have examined our hypothesis that autistic children have a similar type of language disorder to that of the patient of dynamic aphasia. The study consists of two experiments. In experiment I, subjects were 10 autistic children aged from 9 to 18, 52 mentally retarded children aged from 7 to 15 and 40 normal children aged from 6 to 10. The experiment was composed of sentence construction task and logico-grammatical cognition task. In the former task, they were instructed to make one sentence using three words given (containing 6 sub-tests). In the latter task, they were instructed to answer the questions based on logico-grammatical cognition (containing 10 sub-tests). As a result, autistic group have shown the lowest mean score in sentence construction task. This result is consistent with our hypothesis. In experiment II, the task was easier than the above to obtain more autistic subjects. Subjects were 20 autistic children aged from 7 to 18, 20 mentally retarded children aged from 8 to 19 and 36 normal children aged from 3 to 6. They were given two kinds of language task; one at word level and the other at sentence level. In the former task, subjects were asked to predicate the action in picture cards (20 verb card tests) and to name the objects in picture cards (20 noun card tests). In the latter task, divided into two parts, they were asked to predicate what is happening in picture cards (containing 10 sub-tests), and secondly, they were asked to arrange or select the picture cards based on their comprehension of different relationships between what have been instructed (containing 20 sub-tests). The results were as follows: 1) The mean score of noun card tests in autistic group was the highest and that of verb card tests was the lowest. These results are consistent with our hypothesis. 2) In picture predication tests, autistic group showed the lowest mean score, and this is also consistent with our hypothesis. 3) Autistic subjects showed great difficulty in making a sentence with correct JOSHI (particles) in the tests above. Mentally retarded group showed the same difficulty, but not so much as autistic group did. In the group of normal subjects, however, such responses couldn't be found as often. 4) The results of relationship comprehension tests did not show a significant difference among the three groups. 5) The correlation between verb card and noun card tests performance was significant in normal and retarded group, but not significant in autistic group.

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In the early researches, it was reported that the normal children who had had many chances to contact with the mentally retarded children had kindlier attitudes toward mentally retarded children than the normal children who had had little chances. This study was conducted to investigate the relationships between the attitudes toward the mentally retarded children and three kinds of the experiences to contact with mentally retarded children in the normal children. In this study, three independent variables were used; the experience of the contacts in the daily life (presence or no presence), the experience of the contacts in the teaching (presence or no presence) and the experience of the contacts in the school events (presence or no presence). All variables were between subjects variables. Then a 2×2×2 factorial design was used. Subjects were 937 normal children in the fourth grade in the elementary schools. They were respectively assigned to one of the 2×2×2 groups, based on the experiences with the mentally retarded children. The dependent variables were two aspects of the attitude; the score of the kindly image on the abilities and personality of the mentally retarded children and the score of the acceptive behavior. The experiences of the contacts were measured by the free answer questions method. The questionnaires of the attitudes were consisted of seven items on the image and seven items on the acceptive behavior. Main results were as follows: 1) The children who had three kinds of the experiences of the contacts were about 7% of all subjects, and the children who had no experience were about 50% of all subjects. These results suggested that teachers should make more efforts to make more chances for the normal children to contact with the mentally retarded children. 2) It was proved that the children who had the experiences of the contacts in the daily life and in the school events were more acceptive than other children. There were not significant relationship between the experience of the contacts in the teaching and the acceptive behaviors. 3) There were positive relationships between the kindly image on the mentally retarded children and the three kinds of the experiences of the contacts, especially the experiences of the contacts in the daily life and in the teaching were important.

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This study was aimed at investigating the characteristics of the sleep-waking rhythm and the relationship between movement and stable sleep-waking rhythm. The subjects in this study were 48 male and 37 female physically handicapped individuals ranging in age from 6 to 20 years. Of 85 subjects, 55 (64.7%) had cerebral palsy. There were ten severely physically impaired subjects who showed polyphasic sleep. Of these 10 subjects, 6 had cerebral palsy, 2 had hydrocephalus and 2 had blindness and mental retardation. They ranged in age from 6 to 12 years. The following pertinent characteristics of the sleep-waking rhythm in the physically handicapped were found. (1) The sleep-waking rhythm of the physically handicapped was similar to infantile polyphasic sleep. (2) The same sleep-waking rhythm was also found in the subjects of the non-self-locomotion group. (3) The existence of monophasic sleep was confirmed in the 12-13 years old subujects. Vestibular stimulation along with muscular sensory stimulation was tried on the subjects who had exhibited polyphasic sleep in order to investigate the causal relation between the sleep-waking rhythm and movement. A 20-30 minutes session 20 times a day for 70 day was carried out. Ninety percent of the subjects demonstrated a significant improvement in sleep-waking rhythm. The experiment indicated the effectiveness of movement for improving the sleep-waking rhythm of physically handicapped children.

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The purpose of this study was to study the rate of correct-response and the tendency of incorrect-response in the presentation of fingerspelling. Fingerspelling was presented one letter at a time. There were three conditions of the time of presentation: SLOW (0.67sec/letter), NORMAL (0.33sec/letter), FAST(0.20sec/letter). Subjects were divided in to 3 groups: T group (the students of T-school for the deaf), U-High-Ability group (the students of U-University with normal hearings who have been learning fingerspelling for more than 18 months), and U-Low-Ability group (the students of U-University with normal hearing who have been learning fingerspelling for less than 6 months). The subjects responded in the written syllabary after five seconds of fingerspelling. The results were as follows: (1) The rate of correct-response was high in the following order: SLOW-NORMAL-FAST-conditions, and T-U-High-Ability-U-Low-Ability group. In the Slow-condition, no significant difference was found between the three groups which suggests that 0.67 seconds is long enough for the reading of finger-spelling even for the less-experienced subjects. But when the time of presentation of fingerspelling was shorter than that in the SLOW-condition, the length of experience of fingerspelling or the age at which learning began seemed to influence the intelligibility of fingerspelling. (2) The tendency of incorrect-response: The shape and direction of fingerspelling seemed to influence the tendency of incorrect-response. Pairs of stimuli and incorrect-response seemed to have some particular characteristics in many cases; the directions were the same and/or the shapes were similiar. This means that such pairs of fingerspelling were formed by adding or reducing one finger. It was concluded that the factors of shape and direction, the time of presentation, the age learning began length of experience influence the intelligibility of fingerspelling.

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