This study examines from various perspectives educational ideas and practices initiated by Kawada in the period before World War II. Kawada founded the Fujikura Gakuen Residential Home in 1919 for the education of children with mental retardation. His educational philosophy is summarized in his book, "Teacher's Instructional Guide". Kawada' s lifework was devoted to the education and understanding of children with mental retardation. His theme was to develop a system of guidance through educational methodology. In educational treatment, in accordance with the subjects required in the Japanese school curriculum, the content of the guidance on education of Japanese language was divided into the areas of speech, writing, reading, composition, and verbal expression. Each dimension of the guidance had its own scientific foundation, as well as widespread applicability. In the learning of the forms unique to the Japanese language, Kawada's method placed importance on the syllable and attached importance to training writing. These forms are worthy of special mention in an introductory manual on the Japanese language for teaching children with mental retardation. They offer excellent methodology and have features in common with the methods of Pestalozzi and Ushinsky.

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This study was an experimental early language intervention with a 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome, teaching her vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills in the context of a joint action routine: making toast. Toast-making consisted of six situations: explaining the routine, toasting a slice of bread, cutting the toast, spreading jam on the toast, accepting instructions from her mother, and eating the toast. Using this routine, words, two-word sentences, and communication skills were taught. In addition to the subject, a 5-year-old boy with Down syndrome and 2 therapists participated in the routine. The results were as follows: In the first part of the experiment, the girl acquired 11 of 12 targeted words. It took her longer to learn verbs than nouns. In the latter part of the experiment, she also acquired all 4 two-word [object+action] sentences. She gradually initiated communication during toast-making, but it was difficult for her to initiate communication in the situation in which the materials were being prepared for making toast. In the first part of the experiment, communication between the two children occurred when the boy with Down syndrome received obscure communicative acts from the girl. But in the latter part, the rate of the girl's declarative speech acts and the frequency of interaction increased.

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Properties of the perception of laterally moving objects were studied in 19 persons with profound retardation by assessing the process of habituation and dishabituation of smooth pursuit eye movements. Stimuli for habituation consisted of 6 trials with a moving circular shape; stimuli for dishabituation, 2 trials of a moving cross shape. The duration of eye movements in pursuit of the stimuli was estimated by the linearity and gradient of the horizontal electrooculogram (EOG). To estimate pursuit time, the ratio of the last block of habituation trials (fifth and sixth trials) to the first block (first and second trials) was calculated. When this ratio (Rh) was less than 0.5, that was considered to be an occurrence of habituation; when the ratio (Rd) of the dishabituation trials to the first block of the habituation trials was greater than 0.5, that was considered to be dishabituation. The results and discussion were as follows: 2. Occurrences of habituation and dishabituation to objects moving at the velocity of 5°/s were found in 11 subjects. Their developmental ages (DA) of communication level were higher, and they were evaluated as having clearer responsiveness to many sorts of visual stimuli, compared to the 8 subjects who did not show dishabituation. 2. Only 5 subjects showed habituation and dishabituation to the stimulus moving at the velocity of 10°/s. All of these showed habituation and dishabituation at the velocity of 5°/s. 3. It has been pointed out that memory of the features of repeated stimuli and detection of distinct features of test stimuli are important for shape discrimination, and might enable the occurrence of habituation and dishabituation. This process of discrimination might effectively function in those persons with profound retardation who showed habituation as well as dishabituation to the moving stimuli. 4. The results from subjects whose habituation process became inhibited when the velocity of movement increased indicate that velocity of stimuli is an important factor to consider in presenting objects for educational purposes. 5. In the present study, moving stimuli were effective in evoking visual responses in persons with profound retardation; the method of habituation can be used to evaluate the discriminative capacity of such persons.

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In this study, Sugai's method of evaluating speech (verbal behavior) was used to observe and analyze the speech behavior of three children with hearing impairments. The children's hearing levels were distributed from 113dB to 130dB. The results were as follows: the three children had not learned speech behaviors and could not communicate with speech learning of differentiation of motor development, an undeveloped motor concept, and severe hearing losses were considered to be factors in these children' s difficulty in learning speech. The total-communication approach was emphasized as the way to educate these children.

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