The awareness of defective speech was studied in 66 chronic aphasic patients (18 with Broca's,12 with Wernicke's, 8 with amnestic, 5 with conduction, 5 with global aphasia, and 18 with other types of aphasia) by means of the semi-structurized questionnaire. The results were as follows:
    1 ) Five patients were judged as explicitly defined unawareness of own speech disturbance. Two patients had Wernicke's aphasia, the other three patients had Broca's, amnestic, and striatal aphasia, respectively.
    2 ) Auditory comprehension of these 5 patients was variously disturbed, however, some had relatively good comprehension ability.
    3 ) No one showed explicit anosognosia for one's right hemiparesis, probably due to mildness of leg weakness.
    4 ) On the WAIS-R the mean performance IQ of the five patients was 67, the individual values ranging from 56 to 80, which may reflect a generalized intellectual disturbance.
    5 ) The premorbid personalities of all, except one patient with no available information, were characterized by obstinacy, affability, and excessive work orientation.
    6 ) All five patients had lesions in the frontal lobe, but a more precise region, which may be related to the awareness in the frontal lobe was not definable.
    The phenomena of unawareness of speech deficits in our patients are not satisfactorily explicable on the basis of a single theory. They may be better described as manifestations of the multifarious causes, appearing in a new balanced pattern of organization in the damaged brain and in a limited condition.

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