2021 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 152-162
In this special lecture, I addressed some issues about aphasia therapy from the perspective of the characteristics of Japanese linguistics. First, I pointed out that some open questions need to be solved concerning the application of universal grammar to aphasia therapy and that we must not overlook the characteristics of an individual language, as well as the universality of language, especially from a clinical standpoint. Then, I focused on two topics of linguistic specificity in Japanese and concluded that some aspects of the available strategies in aphasia therapy are different in Japanese than in Western languages such as English and French. First, I discussed mora and kana as unique features of Japanese phonology. In the brain of a Japanese speaker, the phonological unit is a mora rather than a syllable, so the architecture of the neuropsychological model of language information processing may be different in Japanese and English. Also, kana, which represents each mora by one letter, is a unique orthographic system. Because of these unique features, Japanese people with aphasia have access to a richer, more varied therapeutic methodology than Western people with aphasia, especially in the domain of phonological training. As a second topic, I argued that Japanese sentences usually lack a subject from the viewpoint of middle voice, which has disappeared in the modern Indo-European languages but existed broadly in the classical ones. Finally, I introduced the sentence production training program for Japanese people with aphasia that we developed and opened on WEB and that is based on the concept of subject-free sentences.
