The present preliminary study was conducted to determine whether category-specific impairments are present in the naming and auditory omprehension performances of Gogi aphasics.
    Five Gogi aphasic patients participated in the first experiment which consisted of naming and pointing tests, using ninety pictures of well-known objects, divided into nine categories. Categories were: vegetables / fruits, musical instruments, processed foods, sports, animals, utensils, vehicles, colors, and, body parts. Four cases involved lobar atrophy. The other was a case of herpes simplex encephalitis. All had damage to the left anterior and midtemporal lobe in common. All patients showed a high success rate in naming and pointing to colors and body parts, but a low success rate in naming and pointing to vegetables / fruits and musical instruments. The naming and pointing performances for other categories varied among the patients.
    Three of the original four patients with lobar atrophy participated in a second follow-up experiment consisting of the same tests as the first. All patients had severer deficiencies in the naming and pointing of all categories except colors and body parts. The performances for colors and body parts were the same or slightly worse than those of the first experiment.
    The results of the two experiments indicated the following. In Gogi aphasics with lesions involving the left anterior and midtemporal lobe, the production and auditory comprehension of words belonging to the semantic categories of colors and body parts were selectively spared. Therefore, for colors and body parts, the concept-processing systems and the mediation systems to take concepts and stimulate the production of word-forms, or to receive words and cause the brain to evoke the corresponding concepts, appear to be located in areas other than the left anterior and midtemporal lobe.

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    Telegraphic speech has been rarely reported in Japanese patients with Broca's aphasia and is rather known to be characteristic of crossed aphasics. We report on a 54-year-old, right-handed man with telegraphic speech but preserved comprehension, vocabulary and grammar.
    The patient experienced a sudden-onset severe anarthria and mild right hemiparesis without bucco-facial apraxia. He had difficulty writing, particularly in “kana” (phonograms) characters (paragraphia) : therefore his language disturbance was considered to be classified as Broca's aphasia according to Mori and his colleagues. As he improved over a few weeks in the quantity of speech output, telegraphic speech became apparent. It was limited in his spontaneous utterance and particularly overt when he tried to express himself urgently. CT and MRI revealed a small hematoma ( 2 × 2.3 cm at the beginning) in the posterior part of the left middle frontal gyrus. Two months after the onset the patient still showed evidence of a mild telegraphic speech.
    We speculate that the patient would have omitted “joshi” (particles) to produce as much information as possible. This phenomenon may be related to a dysfunction in the process of sentence construction, which has been reported to occur with a lesion in the posterior part of the left middle frontal gyrus.

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    We report a case of conduction aphasia with grammatical problems, following infarction of the left cerebral hemisphere. The case, MK, is a 59-year-old right-handed man.
    In order to investigate MK's grammatical problems, we analyzed his spontaneous speech. The results were as follows. 1 ) MK appears to retain the ability to produce long and complex sentences, and has no problems of word-order. 2 ) particles are substituted, and attempts are made to correct all errors. 3 ) The length of predicates is short and there is a tendency to omit auxiliaries. Errors involving predicates can be categorized as phonological substitution in verbal stems, phonological substitution in functional words and substitution within functional words. Attempts are made to correct all errors.
    These results indicate the subject's ability to structure a sentence is preserved, while his ability to produce particles and predicates is disturbed.

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    The purpose of this study was to explore the structure of semantic fields in aphasic patients using word association. Three word association tests, including free word association, controlled association and a similarity judgment task, were administered to 90 chronic aphasic patients (30 anomic, 30 Broca's and 30 Wernicke's) and 20 normal controls. The differences among the three aphasic groups were analyzed. The results were as follows :
    1) The anomic aphasic patients scored well in free word association and controlled association. They showed more syntagmatic associations than the other two aphasic groups.
   2) The Broca's aphasic patients demonstrated a pattern of responses similar to that of the normal controls, although they made fewer popular responses than the anomic aphasic patients.
   3) The Wernicke's aphasic group made significantly fewer popular responses than the controls. These findings suggest differences in word relationships among the three aphasic groups.

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    We report a patient with aphemia, whose speech has remarkably improved by using the mora-by-mora finger counting method. The patient was a 61-year-old right handed man. He developed dysesthesia in the right hand at the beginning of October, 1989, followed paresis in the right extremity in the middle of the month, and became dumb after awakening on the morning of 25th October. He admitted to the hospital on 20th November. MRI revealed an infarction involving left precentral gyrus and underlying white matter. His spontaneous speech was nonfluent, dysprosodic, effortful, its each phoneme was expressed separately with prominent phonemic paraphasias, ill articulation and recurrence of the same phoneme. His auditory comprehension and reading comprehension were intact with slight difficulty in recalling words and a few writing mistakes. His clinical feature was diagnosed as aphemia without any effect on delayed auditory feedback (DAF). We have introduced tne mora-by-mora finger counting method at reading aloud sentences of 28 ˜ 40 syllables one year and three months after the beginning of speech training. As the result, we found prominent improvement in his speech. He showed less effortful,rapid and better articulation using the method. Futher, he showed these improvement without finger counting just after the exercise of sentenes using the method. We also present this remarkable improvement by sound spectrography. We suppose that the finger counting of the mora-by-mora method might control the rythn of each word, and stabilize the feedback of the patient's own utterance. Thus the somatosensory passway using finger counting might urge expressio of words except for auditory feedback.

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    We reported a case of acquired aphasia in childhood. The case was a right-handed boy, 7 y. 7 m. at onset. The aphasia type was conduction aphasia, gradually recovered in auditory comprehension and speech. But it remained difficult for the subject to learn reading, writing and arithmetic in the classroom.
    In this report, the child's oral reading errors were analyzed. They presented different patterns from adult aphasics, adult dyslexics and developmental dyslexics. Also, normal children's errors in reading were almost similar to the subject's errors in characters, except for errors in grapheme-phoneme conversion, but he made many more errors than normal children.

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