Abstract
Imura (1943) described an unique aphasic syndrome shown by Japanese patients and designated it as Gogi (word-meaning) aphasia. Salient features are deficits in both recall and recognition of a nominal word with circumlocated repetitive phrases without any deficits in articulation or syntactic aspect of speech. It also shows selective impairments in processing kanji character words, besides kana or arithmetic processing are preserved. The core feature of this syndrome was introduced by Sasanuma & Monoi (1975) as a selective impairment of semantic processing of word meaning which is typically observed in processing kanji rather than kana. In 1992 Tanabe and his colleagues reported seven Gogi aphasic patients associated with lobar atrophy of the temporal lobes. The syndrome of progressive Gogi aphasia observed in those patients showed loss of semantic memory for words. This clinico-anatomical symptomatology is quite similar to the language symptom of semantic dementia. He also pointed out that it originated in descriptions of Pick's works on dementia. Progressive Gogi aphasia can screen with constant deficit patterns in nominal words assessed by word to picture naming and matching, loss of proverb completion and reading errors on idiomatic kun-reading kanji character words. Surface dyslexia is the most common error type of reading among English-speaking semantic dementia patients. We confirmed that surface dyslexia can also observed in Japanese patients with progressive Gogi aphasia by using controlled character-sound correspondence and frequency of kanji character words lists (Fushimi, et al.2009). Progressive Gogi aphasia is a key symptom to understanding semantic dementia.
