Abstract
Individuals with hearing impairment who communicate using sign language are known to present with‘sign language aphasia’．While aphasia tests for individuals with healthy hearing have been adapted for use by those who are hearing impaired and using sign language in the United States, such efforts have not yet been made in Japan. In this study, we administered the naming test from the Standard Language Test of Aphasia（SLTA）to seven individuals with hearing impairment who use sign language. We evaluated the differences in their responses and found that there was agreement among participants regarding the expressions in sign language dictionaries and the words that were difficult to express in sign language. There were only a few words in the dictionaries that correlated with consistent expressions among the participants. Importantly, participants used variable sign language expressions for many words in the naming test. Our findings suggest that there is an urgent need to develop a naming test appropriately designed for the linguistic nature of sign language in Japan.
