Abstract
This study reports a Japanese-Korean bilingual aphasic patient, focusing on Kanji vs. Kana deficits in Japanese and corresponding Kanji vs. Hangul deficits in Korean. The subject was a 65-year-old right-handed man who suffered from right hemiparesis and severe aphasia caused by a cerebral infarction. He premorbidly acquired and used both the languages equally well in speech as well as in writing. We administered four language tests : the Standard Language Test of Aphasia, spoken and written production test, auditory comprehension test, and reading comprehension test. The subject showed similar performances in the two languages on all the tests. In addition, the same deficit patterns were found in the two types of characters in both the languages ; processing Kanji was relatively preserved in both Japanese and Korean, whereas processing Kana and Hangul was severely impaired. It is suggested that these results reflect the same degree of premorbid mastery of both the languages and the similarity between Japanese and Korean in respect to some aspects of language structures, which would have contributed to the similar organization of the two languages in his brain.
