Yoshihata Hiroyo

We report a case of congenital prosopagnosia in a woman in her 30s. The individual, who holds a university degree and works in education, sought medical attention after experiencing difficulty remembering people's faces following a job change. An MRI scan of her head revealed no obvious brain damage and neuropsychological tests showed no obvious decline in general higher brain function. However, when naming facial and head patterns in the Visual Perception Test for Agnosia Famous Face Test version 2 (VPTA-FFT ver.2), her results had a discrepancy of more than +2SD compared to healthy peers. In a task to memorize unknown faces, she did not respond smoothly and remembered clothes rather than faces. She did not have autism, which is associated with congenital decline in facial recognition. Therefore, we diagnosed this case as congenital prosopagnosia. When supporting individuals with congenital prosopagnosia who may experience challenges in daily life, it is important for speech-language-hearing therapists to collaborate with medical doctors to conduct early evaluation and diagnosis, and to provide guidance on appropriate compensatory strategies.

Speech Pathology

Objective: We investigated temporal changes in the types of errors that occurred in a word-picture matching task in patients with acute aphasia. Materials and Methods: Twenty patients with aphasia participated in this study. We tested the participants at two time points (admission and discharge) on a novel spoken word-picture matching task involving varying semantic relationships between the target and a set of distracters. Results: The results showed a reduction over time in the percentage of incorrect errors, and an increase over time in the percentage of errors that involved items semantically related to the target item. Conclusions: A simple method for examining the types of errors made by patients with aphasia can give valuable information about the nature of their auditory comprehension deficits.

失語症者の自己報告アウトカム測定ツールであるJAIQ-21について，内容紹介と失語症者への試用結果を報告した。