Abstract
The case of a 56-year-old male who exhibited fluent aphasia with obvious picture-naming difficulties after herpes simplex encephalitis was reported. Although speech therapy was performed from 3 months after onset, picture-naming difficulties hardly improved. Seven months after onset, however, he devised by himself a unique method for picture-naming, in which he memorized the position within the Japanese syllabary mainly of the initial letter in the target word, and utilized this mnemonic device as a cue for naming pictures.
We examined the efficiency of this method using the single-subjective experimental approach. Results indicated that this method indeed improves picture-naming, and is significantly more effective than the method of reading kana-words aloud. We suggest that, with this method, the self-generated cues employing the 50-sound series are important to extracting the phonology of the target word.
