Abstract
A case of anomic aphasia is analyzed and reported.
A 77-year-old right-handed female developed severe word-finding difficulties following subarachnoid hemorrhage. A CT scan showed widespread damage in the left temporal lobe.
Her language features are summarized as follows : Spontaneous speech was fluent with no grammatical abnormality. Comprehension and repetition were well preserved.
In oral naming, she had severe word-finding difficulties and showed various naming errors. Kana reading and writing were preserved but kanji were severely disturbed.
Strikingly, she could often generate partial phonological fragments of the target word-form, such as ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon, in naming tasks. In addition, she made whole word substitutions that were phonologically related to the target, i. e., she demonstrated formal paraphasia. In reading kanji words aloud, she sometimes showed phonologically incomplete responses. Also she exhibited reading comprehension of kanji words even though there were mispronunciations.
Cases of prominent formal paraphasia reported to date have been accompanied by disability of repetition. We suspected that our patient’ s partial phonological fragments of the target word-form stemmed from a deficit in retrieval of the phonological form of the lexical item and also that formal paraphasia has similar origins. Here, we also discussed the mechanism of these errors.
