2021 Volume 41 Issue 1 Pages 22-30
Our case presented with cerebral infarction with global aphasia. At the beginning of the onset, the patient was mute, but a few days later showed real word recurrent utterance (RWRU) of the word “mild”. About 10 days after onset, her RU changed to RWRU with function words. About 8 months after onset, significant improvements were detected in the comprehension, repetition, reading aloud, and reading compre-hension subtests of the Standard Language Test of Aphasia. However, at the same time, a new RWRU called “Yakult” (name of a beverage product) was also mixed in her speech, and the appearances of RWRUs were limited to the content word parts. Based on “good maintenance of comprehension and repetition” and “the fact that her RUs were RWRUs”, we considered that the failure of the word-finding process in the phono-logical output lexicon could have caused the output of her RUs. In addition, the strong stereotypy of RU indicated that the promotion or suppression of the intended / un-intended vocabulary was difficult to control. We considered the possibility that damage to the basal ganglia, common in RU cases, had an effect on the imbalance of neural circuit activity (hyperdirect pathway, direct pathway, an indirect pathway) of the basal ganglia.
