精神薄弱児における不定数量語の意味
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概要
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Needless to say, usual methods for the measurement of meaning such as question-naires or paper and pencil tests necessarily limit the age of subjects, and therefore, previous studies in this field were mostly concerned with intellectually normal or superior school-children. Recently, however, the author tried to determine the preschool-children's interpretations of indeterminate number words (quantitative words) with an operational method for the measurement of meaning. In this study feeble-minded children were tested with this method. This method differs from usual ones in that it operationally determines the meaning of indeterminate number words through action. It only requires each subject to take out "many" or "a few" etc. of beads from a container and put them in a tray. Because of this simple procedure it was expected that this could be applicable to feebleminded children. Stimulus words selected for this study were "hijoo-ni ooi", "ooi", "ooku mo sukunaku mo nai", "sukunai" and "hijoo-ni sukunai". Here "hijoo-ni" means "very", "ooi" means "many" and "sukunai" means "a few".The main findings are summarized as follows:1) Feeble-minded children can be classified into three groups according to their scores for "hijoo-ni ooi" and "ooi". In group A children the scores of "hijoo-ni ooi" and "ooi" were 76.38 and 78.63 respectively when background number was 100. The difference between two scores is not significant. For groups B and C the meaning of "hijoo-ni ooi" is equal to that of "all". These two groups, however, differed in that group B children regarded the meaning of "ooi" as about 63, whereas group C children regarded the meaning of this word as equivalent to that of "hijoo-ni ooi".2) It was suggested from the comparison with normal subjects that the language of the feeble-minded could not necessarily be characterized as the retardation of the development.3) Feeble-minded children seem to understand three words correctly as "ooku mo sukunaku mo nai">"sukunai">"hijooni sukunai". However, they do not necessarily seem to understand the meaning of five words of this experiment as "hijoo-ni ooi">"ooi">"ooku mo sukunaku mo nai">"sukunai">"hijoo-ni sukunai".4) The expectation that the development of indeterminate number concept may have a close relationship with that of determinate number concept in the feebleminded were not supported.5) Lastly mention was made of the reliability of this method when applied to the feeble-minded.