The purpose of this symposium was to clarify how the term, "language retardation", was understood in various fields, such as psychology, medicine, psycholinguistics and speech pathology, and how the "language-retarded children" were treated in their fields, respectively. Through discussions, manysided characteristics of the language-retarded children were emphasized some suggestions for understanding development of cognition and language were made. J.Murai, a psychologist, pointed out that the term, "language retardation", was differently used by each researcher relevant to the subject, and that a clear definition of it was needed to obtain a comon framework while discussing these problems. He argued that it was necessary to invent an effective normative scale for language development. He also emphasized that the formation of symbolic function was important for language development and that speech therapy was needed to understand the development of the whole personality. J.Shionaga, a medical clinician, indicated that from the practical standpoint, it was more productive to analyze each symptom of cases in details and to seek concrete methods for treatment than to stick to the formal diagnoses and classifications. She also emphasized the importance of an early examination and training, and she presented some examples:mother learning of sucking of movements in early infants of cerebral palsy, auditory brain stem responses, and some drug treatments. According to H.Hayashibe, there were few researches on language retardation on a psycholinguistic approach. On the base of his analysis of language development in hearingimpaired children, he suggested that language development would be genrally equivalent to acquirement of rules, and that the process of this acquirement be a kind of "hypothesis-correction process". He pointed out that the education and treatment on language-retarded children should be performed, in consideration with the characteristics of this process. T.Kodera, speech pathologist, insisted that learning on the formation of symbolic functions, considering the signreferent relationship, was more critical than paired-association learning actually prevailingly in speech therapy. She indicated that at the present it should be more practical and productive to classify language retardation in relation to the concrete treatments or to the settings of the training goals for each case than in relation to the etiology. S.NaKajima, as a discussant, pointed out that through the presentations of these four speeches a common characteristic of language development could be found; the language development should be closely related to the development of other aspects, such as cognitive process and interpersonal relationship. And he pointed out that we should not only take into account the development of phonation, articulation and auditory mechanism, but also the emotional relationship to parents, togetler with its cognitive process. Furthermore, the following problems were discussed : (1)the significance of drug treatments in understanding mechanisms of autistic and hyperactive disposition as well as of minimal brain dysfunction, (2)the influence of the early training which uses sucking movements in cerebral palsied infants on the development of personal relationship and cognitive processes, (3)the limitation of paired association learning in language training, (4)the characteristics of the barrier to syntactic operations in hearing-impaired children. Finally, some comments were made on the necessary conditions for a clear definition of the term, "language retardation".