Mothers' attitudes and their evaluations of their husband's attitudes toward their families, as well as their expectations for their husbands and their social environment, strongly influenced them in bringing up their children who had various disabilities (mentally retardation, autism, deafness, physical disabilities, or blindness). Therefore, the present research was carried out to investigate: (1) the mothers' attitudes toward their husbands, (2) their expectations for their social environment that were related to their children's treatment and education, and (3) the relations between the cognitive structure of evaluations and expectations, and the types of disability that their children had. A questionaire was used that had questions concerning mothers' attitudes toward their families, their evaluations of their husbands' attitudes toward their families and their expectations for their husbands, as well as their expectations for social events concerning their children's growth, such as their children's treatment and education. The results were as follows: 1) The mothers' evaluations were factor analysed. For each of self evaluations, the evaluations of their husbands and expectations for their husbands, two factors were extracted. It was concluded that cognitive conflicts existed in the mothers' cognitions. 2) The mothers' expectations of the environment were analysed by Hayashi's quantification theory type III. This analysis generated four axes; mothers' attituded were classified into three main types: passive attitude, active attitude, and median attitude, and, further, passive attitudes were classified into three subtypes. 3) To confirm the relation between mothers' attitudes and their children's disabilities, discriminant analysis was used. Classification errors occured differently according to the characteristics of the children's disabilities.

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A previous study by the present author indicated that minimum negotiation on a child's request would fail if the negotiation was between an adult and a prelinguistic child with severe mental retardation. "Minimum negotiation" means a chain of three turns consisting of the child's communicative attempt, the adult's offering an interpretation of it, and the child's expressing acceptance of what was offered. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mechanism of this failure. Data from four adult-child dyadic interactions in which the child requested an object or action were analyzed in terms of the child's concern for the adult's responses and their communicative functions. The child's concern for the adult's responses was examined in terms of the direction of the child's gaze during the initial gesture and turn floor provision after that, and the topography of the child's mand behavior after the adult's response, including direct action, handling, repetition of an initial gesture such as hand pressing, and addition of the other gestures. The adult's responses were classified into immediate satisfaction of the child's demand, looking at the child, and verbal responses. Verbal responses were divided into obliging ones, such as a request for confirmation or clarification, and non-obliging ones that acknowledged the child's request or offered some interpretation of it. The results showed three typical patterns of failure: (1) an attempt at negotiation, where the child would not provide an opportunity to respond, so that the adult, accordingly, would satisfy the child's demand immediately after the child's gesture: (2) misfired negotiation, where the child would neglect the adult's response by choosing direct action or handling: and (3) deadlocked negotiation, where the adult would request the child to confirm or clarify the child's demand and the child could not help repeating the initial gesture or using additional gestures, being unable to confirm or clarify. Although two of the four children, who were in a relatively lower developmental status, fell under the first two patterns (one in each), the other two children, whose developmental status was relatively high, showed the third pattern. However, these three patterns could not describe all the cases. For example, the adult frequently satisfied the child's demand immediately, even when the child had provided a response opportunity. Another unanswered question was why the adult would request confirmation or clarification, when it was apparently easy for the adult to recognize the child's difficulty in fulfilling that request. Further investigation is needed to answer these questions.

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A Child with autism who could imitate verbal language was trained to go to an adult "supplier" and make a request for a specific object by saying a sentence such as "Give me〜". Then the child had to deliver the object to another adult (the "director") when instructed to do so. At first the child was trained in the daily classroom setting with spontaneous demand training. The spontaneous demand training was conducted to establish the following behavior chain: The child, asked for an object by a "director", was trained to go to another adult and request the object by saying a sentence such as "Give me〜". He was also trained to say, "That's not what I want. Give me〜", when a non-requested object was given to him. The results were as follows: 1) Without training in learning to follow orders, the child could go to the "supplier", request a specific object, and deliver the object to the "director". 2) Through spontaneous demand training, when a nonrequested object was given to the child, he could say "That's not what I want. Give me〜". However, 3) the child could not say, "That's not what I want. Give me〜", during baseline prior to training in following orders. Through training in following orders, he could make a request by saying, "That's not what I want. Give me〜", when a nonrequested object was given. It was suggested that the verbal behavior of saying, "Give me〜", in the training in following orders was transmitting behavior rather than demand behavior, and that these two types of behavior function differently. 4) These verbal responses were successfully generalized on three dimensions: different trainers, different objects, and different training places.

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One of the purposes of training children with disabilities is in order for them to have adequate locomotion ability. Motor action training aims at attaining this purpose by enhancing the ability to control one's body through several training tasks that have the child exercise by holding a given posture. In the present paper, the method of motor action training was applied to one child with cerebral palsy and one with Down syndrome, in order to examine whether locomotion appears or not. The relation between the effects of the training and locomotion was discussed. In early sessions, the child with cerebral palsy was not able to kneel or stand up grasping a bar by himself. But he was able to do those tasks after some training sessions. He was also able to go up the stairs on all fours, do knee walking, and walk grasping a bar. After some training sessions, the child with Down syndrome was able to stand up and walk grasping a bar much more often than in early sessions. These results confirm the view that locomotion ability is advanced when the ability to hold a given posture, in other words, the ability to control one's body, is enhanced. It is inferred that the ability to put power into the upper part of the body, the midsection, and the legs in a vertical direction, coping with gravity, is related to locomotion in a vertical direction, such as moving from sitting to standing, and the ability to keep one's balance is related to locomotion in a horizontal direction, such as walking.

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