Fragmented words: A case of late-stage progressive aphasia

要旨

Two years after the initial investigation of a Japanese case with a mixed fluent/non-fluent progressive aphasia, the patient still had a relatively pure language disorder which had deteriorated sharply. Her spontaneous speech at follow-up consisted almost entirely of repetitive jargon; but the single-word speech production tasks of object naming and reading aloud revealed two striking phenomena: (i) she sometimes produced the first one or several syllables of a target word correctly before tailing off into jargon; (ii) both the occurrence and the size of these correct phonological fragments were task-related, following the gradient of kana word reading < kanji word reading > picture naming. Differential performance in the three tasks is attributed to differences amongst the three stimulus types in the degree to which they provide constraints specifying the correct phonological representation.

主題