For children with development disability who are not adaptable to new surroundings, it is not easy to have a medical examination. Medical practitioners often cannot find appropriate words and hence feel difficulties in approaching hyperactive children. Past studies of children with intellectual disability in school indicated that onomatopoetic expressions of children’s physical motion by teachers worked effectively(Takano,2010). Ishidate (2018) has reported the effectiveness of onomatopoetic expressions in addressing normal children at out-patient clinic. In this study, onomatopoetic expressions used by nurses who are taking care of children with development disability were investigated to provide basic information for appropriate approach to such children.
Methods:
Ten nurses who works in medical institutions for disabled children in Tokyo having more than 5-year experience in taking care of children with development disability were interviewed according to the method by Ishidate et al (2014,2015). The transcript of the interview recording was analyzed by a text mining software.
Results:
Basic statistics values were as follows; Number of total sentences was 1405, average length of a sentence was 15.8 letters, Number of words used was 884 kinds and 4,484 in total. Number of verbs, noun, adverb, and adjective were 1,594, 923, 756, and 254 respectively. The type-token ratio was calculated to be 0.194.
Total number onomatopoeias spoken by the subject nurses was 369. Most frequent onomatopoeia was “chikkun”, an expression of sticking needle of injection or blood drawing, which was spoken 37 times by the 10 nurses, followed by “gyut” (holding firm), “makimaki” (wrapping around), etc.
In comparison with the previous study about non-disabled children (Ishidate et al,2014), 10 out of the 20 most frequently used onomatopoeias commonly appeared in both studies. However, both frequency and kinds of onomatopoetic expression observed in this study were fewer than those in the previous study.
Conclusion:
In comparison with the basic statistics in the previous study (Ishidate et al,2014), only the type-token ratio in this study was lower. Since higher type-token ratio indicates that the content of sentence is richer, the lower ratio in this study indicates that even the nurses taking care of children with development disability speak longer sentence, the content of their talk is not richer. In addition, both frequency and kinds of onomatopoetic expression observed in this study were fewer than those in the previous study about non-disabled children, although 10 out of 20 onomatopoeias appeared in both studies in common.
These results suggest that nurses taking care of children with development disability do not depend heavily on verbal communications with them. There have been such reports that show the effectiveness of visual support in dentistry (Hirata et al,2014), and the usefulness of graphic cards in explanation to children with development disability (Vaz,2013). Taking all the results in this study and previous reports into consideration, the author suggests that the development of effective multimodal communication methods with patient children, such as in combination with conversation using onomatopoetic expressions and visual approach, etc., may be possible in the future.
Acknowledgment:
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP17K01803.