An effective way of oral communication was searched for a female patient whose intelligence was normal but limbs were paralyzed due to brainstem and cerebellum lesions. She needed to use a respirator, so phonation was impossible. She could control her tongue and lips to a certain extent but not enough to form all consonants and vowels. The following three methods were tried: 1) Using an electrical larynx. 2) Using a speaking tube. 3) Developing the nonphonating communication skill with signs using facial and oral movements. These signs represented some consonants and vowels. For example, when she wants to represent /ka/, she had to blink twice, then to make the oral form of /a/. She could not use the first and second methods effectively. With the third method she learned the signs representing the consonants and vowels and was successful in communicating with others. This nonphonating oral communication skill improved her quality of life greatly.

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The purpose of this study was to evaluate the discourse abilities of persons with aphasia and compare them with those of normal adults. Both groups were presented with five strips of a comic story taken from Ulatowska et al. (1981; 1983). The two groups were independently asked first to arrange the strips in the order of the story and then to verbalize the whole story. The result was that the aphasia group revealed lower abilites in both recognition and production, and that the superstructure of their discourse production was fewer than that prodused by the normal group. The next step should be to find a better way to analyze discourse by applying the same method to various kinds of materials such as a episodic discourse, a procedural discourse, etc., so that the level of difficulty of each text could be clearly shown in figures.

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To investigate the emergence of communicative behaviour, the course of the development of ten gestures in two normal infants was observed. Data was gathered for one male infant and one female infant from six to eighteen months of age by using the diary method. The following results were obtained from this one year period of observation: (1) The order of the appearance of gestures fell into two groups: pointing, head-shaking, showing and hand-waving for the first group: hand-raising, nodding, bowing, out stretched arms (vertically), out-stretched hand and beckoning for the second group. (2) Although the gestures in the first group emerged as early as nine months of age, they had no communicative function right after they appeared. (3) The gestures in the second group appeared later than the first group and had a communicative function during the early stage of their appearance. As a result of this study, we think that there is a stage in which an infant enjoys producing gestures without a communicative function before gestures are used for communication. We also speculate that this turning point is about the age of fifteen months.

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Classification of word-finding difficulty is based on different stages of naming, which are related to distinct anatomical areas. Recent studies using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) revealed that word knowledge was organized categorically in the left hemisphere. We studied 42 patients with focal brain lesions, 5 patients with Alzheimer's disease, and 25 normal controls on a picture-naming task consisting of 100 nouns in 10 different categories, a category-naming task and a verbal fluency test in 10 categories. Intergroup comparison revealed that aphasics showed significantly poor performance in each task except naming body parts and vegetables, recalling people's names and names of something round. In comparison between patients with and without left frontal lobe lesions, we found that the former had significantly lower scores than the latter in the verbal fluency test, but not in the category- or picture-naming tasks. Patients with Alzheimer's disease showed disturbances in the category-naming and verbal fluency tests, but not in the picture-naming task. The longitudinal study of a patient with semantic aphasia revealed that naming and pointing to body parts was relatively preserved compared with other categories. The task applied and category of words are crucial factors to elucidate the nature of word-finding difficulty.

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Three factors, object, sensory modalities, and intention, among others which are thought to affect word retrieval are described. The first factor of object includes characteristics of an object and manners of presentation of an object. The former is subdivided into explicit characteristics and implicit characteristics. These factors are known to affect word retrieval in aphasics. The second factor of sensory modalities consists of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory and gustatory sensations. We usually depend on visual modality for word retrieval in daily life. Aphasics seldom show dissociation between sensory modalities on word retrieval. However, optic aphasia and tactile aphasia are well known modality specific naming deficits. The third factor of intention is voluntary evoked word findings. The dissociation of voluntary-evoked (word findings) and stimulus-evoked (naming) word retrieval is obvious among symptoms of the anmestic aphasia which Pitre reported in 1898. These three factors are not independent of each other and are processed simultaneously on word retrieval.

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We retrospectively analyzed the improvement of word finding difficulty during the acute stage in 45 post-stroke aphasic patients. The results in the object naming (No. 5) were compared to those in the other subtests of the Standard Language Test of Aphasia (SLTA). We investigated factors that may have a relation with the improvement of word finding by analyzing three patients who had severe difficulties in word finding, namely severe aphasia at the first assessment. The results were as follows: (1) The improvement rate of the object naming was correlated with that of the description of behaviors (No. 7), oral command (No. 3) and written command (No. 18) among the subtests in SLTA. (2) The improvement rate of the object naming had no relationships with age, causes of stroke, type of aphasia and lesion size of infarct. (3) Patients who had large infarct and severe word finding difficulty on acute stage, were occasionally accompanied with very good improvement. (4) The remarkable improvement was observed in patients whose lesion did not involve the language areas.

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The purpose of this paper is to report the examination of aphasics' responses on four word-finding tests. On the confrontation naming test and the category naming test, there were various types of semantic relationships between the targets and the error responses. Especially in the confrontation naming test, the most prevalent error response was that of another item belonging to the same semantic category as the targets. The types of other related responses were very diverse. On the two verbal fluency tests in semantic categories and in ‘ad hoc categories (e. g., “If your house should catch fire, what would you bring out?”)’, aphasics generated several words which were typical responses to that category as well as relatively rare responses. On the verbal fluency test in semantic categories, most of the typical responses of aphasics overlapped with those of normal subjects.

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