Speech sound errors in patients with conduction and Broca's aphasia

Speech sound errors exhibited by three conduction and three Broca's aphasic patients on naming and word-repetition tasks were subjected to phonemic and subphonemic analyses. In the conduction aphasic patients, errors occurred equally often on consonants and vowels in both the naming and word-repetition tasks, while in the Broca's aphasic patients errors occurred selectively on consonants. Transposition errors occurred almost as often as substitution errors in the conduction aphasic patients, while substitution errors constituted the majority of errors in the Broca's aphasic patients. The Broca's aphasic patients, as compared to the conduction aphasic patients, exhibited a markedly higher number of substitution errors occurring between phonemes separated by a single subphonemic feature on the naming task. On the basis of these findings, it was hypothesized that the differences in the error patterns of the two types of aphasia reflected differences in the underlying mechanisms of the impairment in each type.     

The recovery processes of two English-Japanese bilingual aphasics

The recovery processes of two English-Japanese bilingual aphasics, one with Broca's aphasia and the other with Wernicke's aphasia, were investigated with special emphasis on the effect of language therapy. The degree of impairment initially manifested in English and Japanese was almost equivalent in each case, the pattern of impairment corresponding to the respective types of aphasia. In both cases, systematic, controlled language therapy was conducted. Analysis of the recovery courses revealed that language therapy was one decisive variable in the relative degree of recovery of a bilingual aphasic's two languages. The type of aphasia appeared to exert a crucial influence on the relative recovery rate of different modalities.     

Aphasic's comprehension of sentences expressing temporal order of events

Fifty-seven aphasic patients' comprehension of five sentence forms which express the temporal order of events has been investigated. Three major patterns of errors of temporal relations have emerged. The dominant pattern is exhibited by patients making errors on Before's but not on After's. The second and third patterns comprise a fewer number of patients making errors on After's but not on Before's and those making errors on both Before's and After's, respectively. It has been shown that different syndromes of aphasia are equally distributed among these three patterns. In the follow-up study of several patients, fluctuating courses of recovery in which comprehension of before and after alternately increases and decreases have been observed. These results are discussed in connection with a possible account of the acquisition of before and after in Japanese.     

The nature of the task-stimulus interaction in the tachistoscopic recognition of kana and kanji words

To investigate the nature of the task-stimulus interaction in tachistoscopic recognition of kana and kanji, right-handed normal subjects performed two phonological tasks and two visual tasks. In the phonological tasks, the subjects compared the members of a pair of kana or kanji appearing in the right or left visual field on the basis of phonological identity; while in the visual tasks, they compared the members of a pair of kana or kanji on the basis of visual identity. The results showed a significant Visual Field × Task interaction as well as a significant Task × Stimulus interaction, indicating that both the type of stimuli and the nature of task demands contribute importantly to the determination of visual field asymmetry and hence the relative participation of each hemisphere.