Neuropsychological terms refer to neuropsychological phenomena such as aphasia, word finding defects and alexia which we are trying to explain. On the other hand, a group of words including theory, assumptions, hypothesis and explanation are used to evaluate what neuropsychology is as a science at a meta level. To improve neuropsychological research, we need to examine the relationship between these two groups of words. This paper evaluates a neuropsychological description of spatial neglect in the Balint syndrome using Toulmin’s model of reasoning (Toulmin 1956). Here reasoning refers to the logical process of inducing conclusions from evidence and connecting these two using a warrant. This paper suggests that formal argumentation should meet the criteria of Toulmin’s model.

Results from apraxia rehabilitation are not considered to be sufficient evidence in stroke treatment guidelines, as there are no high-quality research reports. In other words, it is necessary to consider approaches that go beyond conventional thinking.

Conventional examination and observation of apraxia have focused on the action of the primary right hand and have revealed the involvement of the left cerebral hemisphere in the conceptual aspect of the action. However, actions in daily life activities usually involve both hands, and it is necessary to consider the role of the right cerebral hemisphere involved in the motor representation of the left hand which has supporting function in almost all daily life activities. In addition, since apraxia patients with paralysis from left hemisphere damage need to perform daily activities with their intact left hand, it is meaningful to clarify the function of the right hemisphere in generating actions from the viewpoint of rehabilitation.

I would like to propose that we consider action generation not only as a left hemisphere function, but also as a mechanism of the whole brain by using the vertical process of language generation in Yamadori (1997a) and considering action generation as a motor output that goes through "judgment based on social context," "generation of action purpose," and "generation of action program" from comprehension of environment (see the Fig.1).

In this study, we compared semantic feature analysis (SFA) with semantic and phonological training using a two-way treatment design for a case of Wernicke's aphasia with neologisms. We analyzed changes in the rate of appearance of neologisms before and after each intervention. As a result, the rate of correct naming showed improvement after both trainings, and there was no significant difference in the effects. However, while the rate of occurrence of neologisms did not decrease with SFA, the number of neologisms decreased significantly with semantic and phonological training. In addition, the percentage of correct responses in the naming test was significantly higher after the intervention than before the intervention, and the number of neologisms that were generated decreased. These findings suggest that SFA is useful in improving naming disorders in aphasic cases involving neologisms generation, but that a phonological approach is also necessary to reduce the number of neologisms.

This study aimed to investigate whether we could predict the results of some neuropsychological tests from the result of Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) of patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) over 1 year from the onset.

We analyzed correlation coefficients between the results of MMSE and other neuropsychological tests of 58 cases with ABI.

Total score of MMSE and total IQ of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV (WAIS-IV) was correlated highly (correlation coefficients is over 0.7). But correlations between subscales of MMSE and other neuropsychological tests were not so high.

This result suggested that we could predict some scores of neuropsychological tests from MMSE, for example total IQ of WAIS-IV would be over 66 if total score of MMSE was 25 or more.

We examined the factors involved in high communicative competence in a case of moderate non-fluent aphasia.

In this case, we believe that onomatopoeia and semantic paraphsia are useful strategies in everyday communication and can be considered AAC.

We believe that this patient's ability to communicate appropriately through various other means when anomia prevented communicating led to her ability to communicate well.