Abstract
The patient was a 72-year-old, right-handed male. He exhibited apraxia of speech after infarction of the lower part of the left precentral gyrus. The purpose of this research was to quantify articulation errors and change of prosody in apraxia of speech. We examined the relationship between the these disorders, and investigated the basic symptoms. Recovery in this patient was very quick and he left the hospital 18 days after development of the symptoms. Utterance was examined on the 2nd, 4th, 12th and 18th days. Soon after onset we observed distortions, substitutions and repetitions in the errors of articulation. On the first two examinations, the occurrence rate of abnormal prosody was higher than that of errors of articulation. The findings suggested that there is no clear relationship between abnormal prosody and articulation errors, because in both aspects the rate of coincidence was 0-50%. Furthermore, comparison of this patient with a paretic dysarthria group in nonverbal repetitive oral movements demonstrated a significant fall in the patient's speed of movement. Although nonverbal simple continuation oral movements were no problem 18 days after onset, parapraxia was observed in complicated repetitive oral movements. Therefore, the nonverbal repetitive oral movements of this patient suggested that coordination of the articulatory organs is impaired in tandem with complications in movement patterns.
