We report a case of somatoparaphrenia (SP) following subcortical hemorrhage of the left parietooccipital lobe. The patient, a 78-year-old, right-handed female, complained of headache, right hemiparesis and vomiting, leading to a confusional state. As her speech recovered after stereotaxic hematoma evacuation, she showed SP in which she referred to her own right hand as “my husband's hand” . This SP continued for seven months. This case shared various traits with right-hemisphere injury cases, such as hemiparesis, sensory disturbance, unilateral spatial neglect (USN) and mental symptoms (emotional incontinence, disinhibition, fatigability, personality change, disorientation). Fluent aphasia, constructional agraphia, ideomotor apraxia, finger construct disorder, buccofacial apraxia and suspected color agnosia were unique to our case. The addition of USN and mental symptoms to hemiparesis and sensory disturbance may cause SP in not only right-hemisphere but also left-hemisphere injury cases.

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    The case of a 56-year-old male who exhibited fluent aphasia with obvious picture-naming difficulties after herpes simplex encephalitis was reported. Although speech therapy was performed from 3 months after onset, picture-naming difficulties hardly improved. Seven months after onset, however, he devised by himself a unique method for picture-naming, in which he memorized the position within the Japanese syllabary mainly of the initial letter in the target word, and utilized this mnemonic device as a cue for naming pictures.
    We examined the efficiency of this method using the single-subjective experimental approach. Results indicated that this method indeed improves picture-naming, and is significantly more effective than the method of reading kana-words aloud. We suggest that, with this method, the self-generated cues employing the 50-sound series are important to extracting the phonology of the target word.

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