1980 年 21 巻 4 号 p. 224-230
The purpose of the study is to investigate whether or not an aphasic patient with severe disorder in expressing herself would learn to communicate with a set of certain graphic symbols immediately associable with things or actions. It is known that aphasic patients who get plus scores in auditory and visual comprehension tests in Standard Language Test of Aphasia (SLTA), can recover the ability to repeat words to some degree, though such ability may be limited to echolalia and not practical.
The patient presented here can communicate by YES or NO sign but had no effective method of expression. We taught the patient to communicate by “picture signs” and got the following results.
i) The patient learned 130 nouns, mostly the names of things. The patient could not learn the “picture signs” to express adjectives and verbs, probably because she could not recall the associations of these signs.
ii) The patient, in errors, indicated a specific features. These are (a) perseveration (b) association (c) confusion of figures similar to each other and (d) confusion in identifying specific meanings of signs when they had similarities.
It seemed difficult for her to draw “picture signs” without an auditory stimulation. However, she responded by drawing “picture signs” immediately to answer a general question such as “what fruits do you like ?”
The result showed that picture signs could be a flexible and meaningful means of expression for a severely aphasic patient.