Language therapy for pure word deafness in children.--A case report

A follow-up study has been made on a girl with pure word deafness, the onset of which was surmised to be when she was nearly four years old. In the present paper, a course of language therapy for the patient during the period from five years and three months to seven years and five months was presented and the advantage of the training program using written language as a communicaiton modality was described. The program has been employed for language training of deaf children in the authors' hospital. During the course of the training, improvement in comprehension and expression was noted as far as the cards with written words were concerned, but the patient continued to have limited ability in auditory perception even at the end of the training period and never regained usable language ability by speech. It was suggested that the language difficulty in this particular case was due to the lesions in the bilateral temporal lobes. We discuss the relation between prognosis of this disability and language therapy.