Hiroshi Fujino

Assessment package for language development in Japanese hearing-impaired children (ALADJIN) as a test battery for the development of practical communication.

Objectives: The measurement of language development in hearing-impaired children is an important step in assessing the appropriateness of an intervention. We proposed a set of language tests (the Assessment Package for Language Development in Japanese Hearing-Impaired Children [ALADJIN]) to evaluate the development of practical communication skills. This package consisted of communication skills (TQAID), comprehensive (PVT-R and SCTAW) and productive vocabulary (WFT), comprehensive and productive syntax (STA), and the STRAW. Methods: A total of 638 children with greater than 70-dB hearing impairment were subjected to this set of language tests. Additional tests, including the PARS, the RCPM, and parental questionnaires, were administered to assess the backgrounds of the children. Results: A trimodal distribution was observed among hearing-impaired children by the histogram-based analysis of each test. Conclusions: The ALADJIN is a useful Japanese-language evaluation kit for hearing-impaired children.

Current situations and problems of software counselling

There are two major contemporary counseling paradigms in the human mental health area, i.e., the client-centered approach and the cognitive-behavioral approach. Both have been adapted to software counseling. Though the former was unsuccessful, the latter has been obtaining generally good results. The client-centered approach seeks to construct an empathic relationship through open dialogue, which is difficult to realize in a computer program. On the other hand, the cognitive-behavioral approach involves systematic instructions using a binary logic. It is programmable and suitable for an expert system. Computer-assisted counseling has some advantages compared with traditional human counseling, e.g., it is cost-effective and highly accessible, but a computer cannot replace the human clinician totally, because total clinical judgments must be generated by unformulizable human skills. Computers can only handle some stages of the whole counseling process as assistants.

Quantitative Aspects of Communicative Impairment Ascertained in a Large National Survey of Japanese Children

The Japanese version of the Children’s Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) was rated by caregivers in a large national population sample of 22,871 children aged 3–15 years. The General Communication Composite (GCC) of the CCC-2 exhibited a distribution with a single-factor structure. The GCC distribution between autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and language impairment (LI) groups in the general population fit inside a bell curve with significant overlap with the general population, and a continuum was evident between groups. No evidence of a natural cutoff that would differentiate categorically affected from unaffected children was seen. The Social Interaction Deviance Composite (SIDC) supported the notion that ASD and LI are on the opposite endpoints of a SIDC continuum of communication impairment.

Characteristics of communication among Japanese children with autism spectrum disorder: A cluster analysis using the Children’s Communication Checklist-2

ABSTRACT Some overlap has been suggested among the subtypes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children. The Japanese version of the Children’s Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) is a useful measure for identifying profiles in relation to communication impairments in children with ASD. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the CCC-2 could identify subtypes in relation to communication impairments in Japanese children with ASD. The study participants were 113 children with ASD but without intellectual disabilities aged 3–12 years. Parents were given the Japanese version of the CCC-2 and asked to rate their children, who were then classified into two groups based on statistical analysis. Significant differences were found between clusters in mean CCC-2 subscales. These results suggest that one subtype was associated with low language competence and strong characteristics of autism, while the other was associated with relatively high language competence and milder characteristics of autism.