Generalization and maintenance of verbal commands ("mands") in two institutionalized deaf adults with mental retardation were analyzed as a function of a time-delay operation with a gestural prompt made by their caretakers. In a previous study, some operations required for changing the mode of the mand (e. g., from signing to writing) were examined in a laboratory setting; also, the results of a preliminary phase of this study showed that a time-delay with some gestural prompting was effective. Generalization and maintenance of the subjects' mands in everyday life settings were monitored from the caretakers' responses on a questionnaire as to how the subjects demanded articles that they needed to use (e. g., facial tissue). Results from this preliminary phase showed that intensive mand training in the laboratory produced no generalization of the verbal demands to everyday life settings. So, a time-delay procedure, which had been confirmed in a preliminary experiment to be effective, was systematically introduced by caretakers to demonstrate its effect. Follow-up observations over a 2-year period showed that the time-delay operation with prompts by the caretakers resulted in general in the initiation and maintenance of subjects' written or signed mands in everyday life settings. One of the two subjects increased the frequency of approaching the caretakers who had used the time-delay operation with prompting, in order to demand materials. These results showed that the time-delay operation with prompting by the caretakers functioned not as an establishing operation, which might have been maintained by negative reinforcement, but rather as a discriminative stimulus for approaching the particular caretakers who had asked these deaf subjects to make verbal demands. In other words, the long-term follow-up analysis of the maintenance of the mands showed that the verbal behavior emitted as a result of the procedures of this experiment was not a "forced" response, but rather a "spontaneous" one for demanding an object, which might be maintained by positive reinforcement.

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A series of sentence comprehension tasks and a task requiring manual expression of pictorial stories were administered to 65 pupils at a school for deaf children. On the basis of their usage of manual expressive skills on the pictorial-story task, the subjects were divided into 4 groups in the following 2-factor ANOVA: 1. Frequent use of gestures vs. signs; 2. Frequent use of iconic means vs. symbolic means; 3. Frequent use of conventional means vs. ad hoc means. Subjects' scores on the sentence comprehension tasks were the dependent variable for the analysis. In the analysis of the subjects' comprehension of sentences with relatively complex meanings, which the subjects were assumed to be in the process of acquiring, the main effects of frequent use of signs, frequent use of conventional means, and frequent use of iconic means were all statistically significant.

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Children's self-cognition of their health is mutually related to other aspects of their selfcognition and to their aims in life, especially with respect to their future way of life. This study investigated how children's health condition influences their future way of life, in relation to other aspects of their self-cognition. The self-cognition and aims in life of physically weak children were clarified by comparing them to those of healthy children. Fifth-year elementary school children in Osaka and in Wakayama City completed questionnaires. Data were usable from 695 males and 672 females, or a total of 1367 respondents. The questionnaires included the following measures: self-cognition of health (11 items), physical constitution and strength (5 items), locomotive ability (5 items), the dominance factor from the Yatabe-Guilford Personality Inventory (16 items), and aims in life (12 items). The main results were as follows: 1. Self-cognition in the above-mentioned areas influenced the aims of life in the following order, starting with the most important: (a) dominance factor from the personality inventory, and locomotive ability, (b) physical constitution and strength, and (c) health. 2. The physically weak children recognized themselves as having less good physical constitution and strength, and less locomotive ability, and appeared more introverted than the healthy children. 3. The difference between the two groups was not so great on the measure of aims in life.

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This article is a case report on a 14-year-old boy with developmental word deafness and mental retardation. He had congenital brain damage in the left temporal lobe. Although his audiogram was nearly normal and he could understand non-speech sounds, he could not understand spoken words, nor was he able to speak words. He could understand and write Japanese kana letters to some degree, but his writing was poor. Training was started in order to develop his auditory comprehension. Two conditions were used. In the first condition, only spoken words were presented at first, and he was required to point to the correct picture. Next, Japanese kana letters were presented in addition to the spoken words, and again he was required to point to the correct picture. In the second condition, only spoken words were presented, and he was required to point to the correct picture. In both conditions, after the pointing task was completed, the subject was asked to repeat spoken words orally. Both conditions were repeated ten times while his auditory comprehension performance was measured. The major findings were as follows: 1. His performance in the condition with kana letters and spoken words was somewhat better than in the condition with spoken words only. 2. The consistency of his responses in the condition with kana letters plus spoken words was higher than in the condition with spoken words only. 3. He did not repeat any words. These results suggest that it was possible to facilitate the development of auditory comprehension with simply the visual image of the kana letters.

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