This study reports a Japanese-Korean bilingual aphasic patient, focusing on Kanji vs. Kana deficits in Japanese and corresponding Kanji vs. Hangul deficits in Korean. The subject was a 65-year-old right-handed man who suffered from right hemiparesis and severe aphasia caused by a cerebral infarction. He premorbidly acquired and used both the languages equally well in speech as well as in writing. We administered four language tests : the Standard Language Test of Aphasia, spoken and written production test, auditory comprehension test, and reading comprehension test. The subject showed similar performances in the two languages on all the tests. In addition, the same deficit patterns were found in the two types of characters in both the languages ; processing Kanji was relatively preserved in both Japanese and Korean, whereas processing Kana and Hangul was severely impaired. It is suggested that these results reflect the same degree of premorbid mastery of both the languages and the similarity between Japanese and Korean in respect to some aspects of language structures, which would have contributed to the similar organization of the two languages in his brain.

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    This study investigated the relationship between the ability to self-correct speech and other language abilities in aphasic patients. We analysed the relationship between the ability to self-correct in naming and repetition and the scores for auditory comprehension and speech on SLTA. The results indicated that both speech and auditory comprehension affected the ability of self-correction. Speaking ability especially affected the rate of success in self-correction specifically. While auditory comprehension especially affected whether the patients could stop their speech right after the erroneous syllable.

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    Speech comprehension proceeds by categorizing input stimulus step by step from the whole into its parts. At the earliest phase of comprehension an utterance is categorized into either the mother tongue or the foreign sounds. The utterance is then categorized by types of sentences ; i. E. command, question or others. Components of the sentence is then categorized into substantive words and functional words. Substantive words are then categorized by functional roles ; i. E. verbs and nouns or by semantic values. Nouns are categorized by biological binding conditions. For instance, color names seem to be related more with the left occipital lobe than any other areas. Names of body parts seem to be related more with the function of the left parietal lobe.
    Categorical function also operates inside a particular semantic group in which many names belong. Here categorization works as an integrating principle to associate a group of similar phenomena with a particular sound pattern, i. E. name. If this function breaks down, a patient would find it difficult to comprehend a heard word as a representative of objects having a similar attribute.

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