Abstract
We report a 31-year-old right-handed woman who presented a pure form of word-meaning deafness. Her comprehension impairment fulfilled the criteria of this syndrome described by Flanklin (1989) ; She was not able to comprehend spoken words that could be immediately understood in written form. Repetition and auditory lexical decision were preserved.
After the operation of left cerebral hemorrhage, she developed mixed type aphasia. In 10 weeks, her speech output gradually improved and the symptoms of word-meaning deafness developed. During conversation, she sometimes echolalically repeated even simple words several times in an attempt to grasp its meaning. When the same words were shown in written form or presented in other words, she could immediately comprehend them. The repetition was 97% correct for single syllables and 80% correct for four-syllable non-words. Lexical decision was 98% correct even in an early stage. Her auditory comprehension was not affected by word frequency but was influenced by word imageability.
These findings suggest that she is a condition in which “acoustic sounds are accurately perceived, correctly analyzed, and recognized as verbal sounds, and the sequences of verbal sounds are recognized as word forms, but semantic information cannot be accessed : Word-meaning deafness”.
