This investigation, initiated on the basis of Jakobson's hypothesis, that is, his theory of a two-stage pattern of phonological development, was dedicated to the purpose of assisting a primary school girl with severe mental retardation to improve further in both phonological and semantic development. Successive sound patterns that she produced were divided into two topological features, that is, the first one was the tendency to adopt a four-rhythm-oriented strategy (i. e., "four-mora" illustrated in this study) toward the rhythmic property of the Japanese language, while another tendency of such a sort of incontiguous dissimilating as seemed strikingly to inhibit the cooccurrence of the same syllabic "i" went hand-in-hand with substitutions of other consonantal and vocalic front or back. For instance, it changed from [i〓〓: 〓i] to [i〓i: ro], but not to [i〓i: ri]. When phonological development as the logarithmic ratio of Type to Token in speech sounds, consonants, and vowels was compared, the correspondence to the developmental sequences between the subject and an infant of about one year of age without mental retardation was even greater. The findings support the hypothesis that, in a teaching program for language acquisition, a child with severe mental retardation would develop phonological and semantic utterance skills from consonantal back to front, and vocalic from front to back.

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This study examined communicative effect as a prerequisite for replacing problem behavior maintained through escape from a difficult task with functionally equivalent assistance-seeking behavior. Participants were two children with developmental delays who exhibited problem behavior in an instructional setting. In Experiment 1, two kinds of assistance-seeking behavior, assumed to have different levels of communicative effect, were trained: (A) specifying assistance, and (B) not specifying assistance. Training was done by manipulating the reinforcement efficiency of this behavior to be higher than the problem behavior. The results showed that these two assistance-seeking behaviors replaced the problem behavior equally in both children. In Experiment 2, a naive trainer's assistance was assessed across the two kinds of assistance-seeking behaviors. Also, the occurrence of problem behavior, and its correlation with the level of assistance, were analyzed. The results indicated that there was a difference between the children. However, the trainer's assistance, that is, reinforcement efficiency, was higher for the "A" behavior, specifying assistance, than for the "B" behavior, which did not specify assistance. The problem behavior recurred if a low level of assistance was received. The results are discussed in relation to the selection of alternative communicative behavior to replace problem behavior, in the light of its communicative effect.

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This study was designed to examine the relation between metaphor comprehension and the development of a linguistic framework in students with hearing impairments. Subjects, 37 students with hearing impairments who were in schools for children with hearing impairments, were tested on 2 tasks: a metaphor-comprehension task and a word-association task. In the metaphor-comprehension task, subjects were asked to choose the alternative that fit the meaning of a target metaphor sentence. In the word-association task, subjects responded to stimulus words with as many associated phrases or words as they could. Subjects were divided into two groups acording to their scores on the metaphor-comprehension task. Responses on the word-association task were classified into 9 types. For each type, the percentage of subjects in each of the two groups was compared. We found that subjects in the group that had scored lower on the metaphor-comprehension task responded with idiomatic phrases more than those who had scored higher. On the other hand, explanations and synonyms were given more often by the higher scoring group. The low scoring group responded with stereotyped phrases. These results showed that students with hearing impairments have difficulty in comprehending metaphor because of their immature linguistic framework. This suggests that development of a linguistic framework is an important factor for the comprehension of metaphors.

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The purpose of this study was to describe changes in the care for people with intellectual disabilities in the prehistory of schools for "idiotic children" in the United States. The problem of people with intellectual disabilities in the poor relief field was a part of the problem of providing care for people with mental disabilities in the 1810's. No distinction was made between adults and children. In this period, problems discussed included care for people with intellectual disabilities, including both "idiocy" and "dementia". In the 1830's, as care for "the insane" developed, people with intellectual disabilities were considered to be incurable. However, in the 1840's, a new principle of care, moral treatment, began. This principle emphasized providing comfortable living in public residential facilities.

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We made teaching materials using patterns of problems that were based on the level of comprehesion of the context. Using these materials, we did individualized instruction for 1 hour per week for 5 students with hearing impairments who were in the second and third grades of elementary school, and we examined the effect of the materials. The result of tests given after instruction was completed was that the children achieved 91%-100% on the area of quantity, and 75%-100% on the area of order. This result shows that instruction using these teaching materials and patterns of problems is effective. The students' language ability was tested by a standardized reading test. Four children showed improved comprehension of clauses, and one student achieved an improvement in the comprehension of sentences. From the above, we conclude that instruction on arithmetic word problems does not nessessarily lead children to comprehend sentences better, but it does lead them to comprehend clauses better.

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The vocabulary of children with hearing impairments has been studied; it is known that the size of their vocabulary is substantially smaller than peers without hearing impairments. However, it remains to clarify the feature of their vocabulary, especially how it deviates from the vocabulary of children without hearing impairments. We explored the acquisition of vocabulary by children with hearing impairments by applying the model of Item Response Theory (IRT). The results were as follows: children with hearing impairments showed, on the average, several years lag in achievement compared to their peers without hearing impairments. The response patterns in a group of children with hearing impairments who showed higher achievement were basically the same as peers without hearing impairments. On the other hand, many of the response patterns in a group of children with hearing impairments who showed lower achievement deviated considerably from those of children without hearing impairments. We studied further the features of each word tested. The tested words were divided into groups according to their response ratio between the children with hearing impairments and without. We found that while some words were comparably easy for them to learn regardless of their level of vocabulary achievement, some specific words caused special difficulties for children with hearing impairments who were at a low achievement level. This was not true for children with hearing impairments whose achievement was at the middle or higher level. Their vocabulary development, and the level, the structure, and the usage evaluated by IRT seemed to be influenced by the teaching they had had.

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This study examined the relation of type and degree of disability and examination method on score distributions on the Joint First Stage Achievement Tests specially administered for students with 9 categories of disability. The results of the study showed that type of disability noticeably affected score distributions, because the distributions of the total scores for 5 academic subjects (English, Japanese, mathematics, science, and social studies) were significantly different among the students in the 9 categories of disability, and there were specific significant differences among the students in the various disability categories in terms of their scores on the 5 academic subjects. It was also determined that the test method affected the score distribution, as evidenced by the fact that the scores of students with severe writing disabilities were significantly increased by changing the method of answering. The group of blind students scored significantly higher than the group of students who were partially sighted; this was caused by the extension of testing time allotted only to the blind students. It is concluded that differences in score distributions among the groups with different disabilities clearly reflect the direct effect of their disability on test scores showing their achievement level, which is measured by this examination, and the indirect effect of their disability, which is derived from the factor of the examination method

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