Abstract
The effects of stimulating three modalities in the treatment of picture naming problems are compared. Comparisons focused on a 60-year-old male patient with chronic Wernicke aphasia whose abilities in oral reading of kana words are preserved better than those in repetition and oral reading of kanji words. The three stimulated modalities were oral reading of kana words, oral reading of kanji words and repetition. Selecting two modalities out of three, we compared the efficiency of the three modalities as a facilitator for picture naming, i. e., oral reading of kana words vs. repetition, and oral reading of kana words vs. oral reading of kanji words.
Results demonstrated that oral reading of kana words was generally efficient, while oral reading of kanji words was also efficient for certain words. By contrast, repetition was not efficient.
We considered the underlying mechanism of the facilitation of word retrieval in this case, and discussed the importance of modality selection for stimulation in aphasia therapy according to patient type.
