Sumiko Sasanuma

Tachistoscopic recognition of kana and kanji words.

Abstract The accuracy of recognition of nonsense kana and kanji words tachistoscopically exposed in the left and right visual fields in normal right-handed subjects was investigated. A significant right field superiority for the recognition of kana words and a nonsignificant trend towards the left field superiority for kanji words were shown. The findings are interpreted to support the hypothesis, generated from studies of reading and writing impairment in aphasic patients, that kana and kanji are processed somewhat differentially in the cerebral hemispheres. The nature of cognitive functions involved in kanji processing is discussed.

Kana and kanji processing in japanese aphasics

Evidence is presented indicating that the ability of Japanese aphasics to use Japanese kana signs (phonetic symbols for syllables) and kanji characters (essentially nonphonetic logographic symbols) can be selectively impaired. Three types of impairment can be distinguished in terms of the characteristic patterns of kana versus kanji disabilities, which appear to correlate with some of the major diagnostic categories recognized among speakers of Indo-European languages, such as Brocas Aphasia, Wernickes Aphasia, and Transcortical Aphasia. The results of longitudinal studies made of a limited number of patients representing each type indicate that the recovery processes for kana and kanji impairment are significantly different from type to type. The theoretical implications of these findings for a model of language processing in aphasia is discussed.

Sex differences in cognitive abilities: A cross-cultural perspective

Studies in Western cultures have indicated significant sex differences in certain cognitive abilities. To determine whether similar differences occur in a non-Western culture, this study administered a cross-linguistic battery of tests to high school students in Japan and America. In both cultures, girls averaged significantly higher scores on a Story Recall test, the Digit-Symbol test and a Word Fluency test whereas boys achieved significantly higher scores on a Mental Rotation test. The analysis of standardized test scores further indicated that the size of the sex difference was culture-independent in three out of these four cases. These results are discussed in the context of the GESCHWIND and GALABURDA [Cerebral Lateralization, Biological Mechanisms, Associations and Pathology, Bradford Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts] account of the contribution of testosterone to left-right asymmetries in early cerebral development.

Tachistoscopic recognition of line orientation.

Abstract Right-handed Japanese men and women performed the task of recognizing the direction of lines tachistoscopically exposed in the left and right visual fields. A significant left field superiority was found in the male subgroup but only a nonsignificant trend toward left field superiority in the female subgroup. These findings indicate that the performance patterns of recognizing “nonverbal” material in subjects who make combined use of two nonalphabetical systems, kana and kanji in their orthography, are comparable to performance patterns reported for subjects with alphabetical languages, and provide a basis for evaluating findings on the recognition of verbal material including kana and kanji in these subjects.

Phonological Alexia in Japanese: A Case Study

A pattern of highly selective impairment in reading nonwords is described in a Japanese patient, TY, who achieved essentially normal performance on most of a range of other language abilities tested. Other prominent features of TYs reading were: (1) almost flawless reading of all types of familiar words in both kanji and kana; (2) differential performance, both quantitative and qualitative, on three types of nonwords constructed by altering real words in various ways; (3) dramatic improvement in pronunciation of orthographic nonwords with phonologically familiar pronunciations (pseudohomophones); and (4) from near-normal to impaired performance on different types of mora-based phonological manipulation tasks. With reference to the so-called “triangle” framework of reading (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), these characteristics are interpreted to arise from an impaired phonological production system in which activation tends to fall into familiar patterns c...

Reading kanji without semantics: Evidence from a longitudinal study of dementia

Abstract The effects of the degenerative disease process on patterns of oral reading and reading comprehension of Japanese kanji words were investigated longitudinally in 3 demented patients, based on repeated administration of the 50-item Kanji Pronunciation-Comprehension Test (K.P.C.T.) and a battery of tests assessing a variety of cognitive abilities including semantic memory. On the K.P.C.T., all 3 patients showed essentially perfect oral reading until the very advanced stage of the disease process, which was in marked contrast to the progressive deterioration of their ability to comprehend the same set of words. These findings, consistent with some interpretation of lexical nonsemantic reading in English-speaking neurological patients, suggest the existence of an independent orthography-to-phonology transcoding procedure for kanji words. An interesting discrepancy in the pattern of word pronunciation performance, however, was noted between the Japanese patients (co-existence of near normal word namin...

The recovery processes of two English--Japanese bilingual aphasics.

Abstract The recovery processes of two English-Japanese bilingual aphasics, one with Brocas aphasia and the other with Wernickes 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 aphasics two languages. The type of aphasia appeared to exert a crucial influence on the relative recovery rate of different modalities.

Subcortical aphasia with deep dyslexia ; A case study of a Japanese patient

The reading performance of a Japanese Broca-type aphasic patient on a single-word reading test was investigated. The result indicated that the subject fits the symptom complex of deep dyslexia in more than one aspect. Unique characteristics of this subject included (1) the isolated subcortical site of the lesion, which apparently produced deep dyslexia, and (2) double dissociations between kanji and kana processing and between oral reading and reading comprehension. The performance of this subject was compared with that of another Japanese deep dyslexic subject in S. Sasanuma (1980, In M. Coltheart, K. Patterson, & J. C. Marshall (Eds.), Deep dyslexia, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). A theoretical implication was attempted based on a dual coding process scheme by S. Sasanuma and O. Fujimura (1978, Cortex, 7, 1-18).

Internal representations and the conceptual operation of color in pure alexia with color naming defects

This research examined the structure of internal representation and the conceptual operation of color in two pure alexic cases (Case I and Case II) with color naming defects. Experiment I investigated the structure of the internal representation of different kinds of colors using a similarity judgment task. Experiment II examined categorical judgments of perceived colors using a two-alternative-forced choice task. Experiment III tested the classification of perceived colors using a color sorting task. The performance of Case I essentially fell within the normal range while the results of Case II showed some impairment in the conceptual operation of color. Analysis of the responses obtained from these experiments indicated that the color naming defects in Case I can be explained in terms of visual-verbal disconnection. However, the naming defects in Case II reflect disfunction in some other higher cortical processes coupled with visual-verbal disconnection.

Voice onset time perception in Japanese aphasic patients.

This study examines identification of the synthetic speech stimuli [ga] and [ka] of varying voice onset times (VOTs) in 17 Japanese aphasic subjects. Approximately two-thirds of the aphasic subjects showed deterioration in performance of VOT identification of the stimuli. A quantitative analysis of the results indicates that the problems of the majority of these subjects may be attributable not only to difficulty in labeling the stimuli but also to difficulty in processing the acoustic and/or phonetic information of the stimuli.