A Patient with Aphasia Who Showed Improvement through Use of Rapid Reading Training of Sentences

Abstract

We conducted rapid reading training on an individual with aphasia who had difficulty in verb naming, using two-clause Japanese sentences in the form of "subject+ particle+verb" (e.g. "Hon wo yomu," which means "I read a book") in order to improve verb naming. His speech was characterized by verb anomia and semantic paraphasia, whereas his auditory comprehension of nouns and verbs was relatively intact and he showed no agrammatism. After 30 days of training using three lists, in which the individual repeatedly read the two-clause sentences aloud accurately and quickly, the following results were achieved: 1) the time required for reading aloud was shortened after 10 days of training, due to reduced self-correction associated with semantic paraphasia; 2) a negative correlation was found between the time required for reading aloud each sentence and the number of training days; and 3) in the TLPA verb naming test, the number of correct answers increased significantly, and the number of verbs induced by preceding nouns also increased after the training. These results suggest that rapid reading training with two-clause sentences promotes accurate and quick phonological retrieval of target verbs.