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This article employs the semantic and motivational aspects to study three Russian dialect words, namely Pskov and Tver Regions посви́рывать ‘to be picky, to disdain’, Kaluga Region ко́бзовать ‘to disdain’, Don, Volgograd, Ryazan, and Tambov Regions скабе́жливый ‘squeamish’. The choice to refer specifically to these linguistic facts is determined by the fact that some of the lexical units presented have not been previously discussed in literature, while, in the author’s opinion, some have controversial etymological solutions. The author states that the word посви́рывать has the root -вир-. Here, the idea of turning is recognised as a motivationally significant one since it reflects popular observations of the behaviour of a person who rejects something. Thus, the axiological assessment of squeamish behavior is fixed in the word’s inner form. The author connects the word ко́бзовать with кобызиться ‘to act arrogantly; to be stubborn, to be obstinate’, where быз indicates ‘a whiny, capricious child’. An assumption is made that a number of lexical units, such as Vologda Region бзли́вый ‘spoiled, capricious’, Perm Region скобы́чка ‘a quarreler and a mean person’, etc. belong to the same family. The author builds potential lines of their semantic and motivational development. The family includes designations of character traits (arrogance, boastfulness, foppery, cockiness, quick temper, cunningness) and human behaviour (such ideograms as ‘to cry’, ‘to frown’, ‘to be angry’, ‘to take offense’). The author hypothesises that the lexical unit скабежливый also refers to the family of the -быз- root. This conclusion is made based on phonetic variation in the root (скабе́зливый, скабы́зливый, скобызко́й) and the similarity in the development of meaning for all the lexical units studied (also, they share the semantics of arrogance, sensitivity, and tearfulness)., Статья посвящена изучению в семантико-мотивационном аспекте трех русских диалектных слов, а именно пск., твер. посви́рывать ‘привередничать, брезговать’, калуж. ко́бзовать ‘брезговать’, дон., волгогр. ряз., тамб. скабе́жливый ‘брезгливый’. Исследовательский интерес вызывает то, что часть представленных лексем ранее не рассматривались в литературе, часть же имеет спорные этимологические решения. Автором статьи в слове посви́рывать выделяется корень -вир-. Мотивационно значимой при этом признается идея верчения, которая отражает народные наблюдения над поведением человека, отказывающегося от того, что ему предлагают. Тем самым во внутренней форме слова закрепляется аксиологическая оценка брезгливого поведения. Слово ко́бзовать автор связывает с кобызиться ‘вести себя надменно, гордо; упрямиться, ломаться’, быз ‘о плаксивом, капризном ребенке’. Делается предположение о принадлежности к этому же гнезду еще ряда лексем, таких как волог. бзли́вый ‘избалованный, капризный’, перм. скобы́чка ‘о вздорном, вредном человеке’ и др. Выстраиваются предполагаемые линии их семантико-мотивационного развития. Так, в гнезде содержатся обозначения черт характера (высокомерие, хвастливость, франтовство, бойкость, вспыльчивость, хитрость) и поведения человека (присутствуют такие идеограммы, как ‘плакать’, ‘хмуриться’, ‘злиться’, ‘обижаться’). Автор выдвигает гипотезу о том, что лексема скабежливый также относится к гнезду корня -быз-. Вывод делается на основании фонетического варьирования в корне (скабе́зливый, скабы́зливый, скобызко́й) и сходства в развитии значения для всех представленных лексем (здесь также обнаруживается семантика заносчивости, обидчивости, плаксивости).

In the present study, we measured whether competence-related high and low social status attributed to two unknown individuals affects participants’ implicit reactivity to abstract stimuli associated to the identity of the same individuals. During a status-inducing procedure, participants were asked to play an interactive game with two (fake) players coded as high vs low status based on their game competence. Before and after the game, a modified version of the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) was administered in which the players’ faces were used as primes. The evaluation target, as is typical to AMP, was a Chinese ideogram. There were two different presentation timings for the prime image: 75 ms and 17 ms. After the status-inducing procedure, the evaluation targets preceded by the high-status prime (i.e. best player’s face) were rated as more pleasant than those preceded by the low-status prime (i.e. worst player’s face). This effect was only found, however, for the 75 ms lasting prime. Moreover, explicit ratings of the primes showed that the high-status player was rated as more intelligent, competent and dominant than the low status one. These results indicate that implicit preference and explicit evaluation of unacquainted individuals are rapidly modulated by competence-based social status attribution, thus hinting at the plastic nature of social categorization and, relatedly, the malleability of visual preference.

In Japan, both typically developing students and students with developmental disabilities often exhibit difficulties with Kanji (Japanese ideogram) writing. These students sometimes demonstrate mirror writing (retrography), suggesting that they have difficulty in locating the parts of Kanji words rather than in writing itself. We examined whether five students with writing difficulties could learn and maintain the stimulus relations among Kanji words, spoken sounds, and corresponding pictures required for writing skills by using two types of pairing procedures: sequential stimulus pairing (SSP) and stimulus pairing (SP). In the SSP procedure, one of the two parts of a Kanji word was presented on the one side of a display, and the other part was sequentially presented on the other side, prior to presentation of the whole Kanji word. In the SP procedure, the whole Kanji word and its spoken sound were presented first, followed by its corresponding picture. The effects of training, as measured by writing performance and the number of training blocks to meet a mastery criterion, were evaluated by means of binominal tests and analysis of variance. The results showed that all students learned to correctly write Kanji words using both procedures, although the SSP procedure required fewer training blocks and enabled students to maintain their knowledge longer. These results suggest that presenting the parts of a stimulus sequentially in their correct spatial location made it easier to observe the Kanji stimuli and might therefore facilitate the acquisition of Kanji writing skills.

Stroop interference is characterized by strong asymmetry between word and color naming such that the former is faster and interferes with the latter but not vice versa. This asymmetry is attributed to differential experience with naming in the two dimensions, i.e., words and colors. Here we show that training on visual-verbal paired associate tasks equivalent to color and shape naming, not involving word reading, leads to strongly asymmetric interference patterns. In two experiments adults practiced naming colors and shapes, one dimension more extensively (10 days) than the other (2 days), depending on group assignment. One experiment used novel shapes (ideograms) and the other familiar geometric shapes, associated with nonsense syllables. In a third experiment participants practiced naming either colors or shapes using cross-category shape and color names, respectively, for 12 days. Across experiments, despite equal training of the two groups in naming the two different dimensions, color naming was strongly affected by shape even after extensive practice, whereas shape naming was resistant to interference. To reconcile these findings with theoretical accounts of interference, reading may be conceptualized as involving visual-verbal associations akin to shape naming. An inherent or early-developing advantage for naming shapes may provide an evolutionary substrate for the invention and development of reading.

In the new age of digital communication, when most of our human-to-human interaction takes place on the internet, new strategies to make up for the lack of nonverbal cues, such as body language or voice tone, needed to be invented. This, in turn, led to the popularization of digital pictograms and ideograms, which have evolved greatly over the past two decades, allowing people to express themselves with a new type of nonverbal cue. Digital pictograms and ideograms developed into the virtual “body language” of the digital age, which, at first glance, might appear understandable without knowing the interlocutor’s language or the background to it. As the phenomenon spread around the world and across different cultures, it became clear that some digital pictograms and ideograms differ. In particular, differences between Western- and Eastern-style pictograms became a focus for researchers. However, even different ‘Eastern-style emoticons’ may create confusion among the users. Two countries known for their extensive use of digital pictograms and ideograms in everyday communication are Japan and Korea. Their cultures are often compared, and although they share numerous characteristics, there are some important linguistic differences between them that should not be overlooked. Of particular interest here are the differences resulting from diversity in digital communication between Japan and Korea, and these have not been paid the attention they deserve. This research aims to address the problem of cultural bias (by users from seemingly similar backgrounds) in interpreting and understanding ‘Eastern-style emoticons’. Using a specially designed survey (a mix of forced choice and open questions), we investigate main differences in the reception of keurim mal in Korea and kaomoji in Japan. Moreover, we attempt to anticipate problems that may emerge from possible misunderstandings (or misinterpretations) of such.

Introduction: Aphasia is a pathology that causes a compromise in speech and / or writing, caused by an acquired lesion on the left side of the brain. It can cause language confusion and can impair access to vocabulary, syntactic organization, coding, and decoding of messages. We can classify as a severe aphasic patient, the one who does not speak or write, but there is production of unintelligible sounds, in other words, doesn’t have an articulate speech. Supplementary and / or alternative communication (SAC) is a form of contribution to benefit the language of patients with impairment in verbal communication, in this case aphasic. It is composed of verbal and nonverbal signs that stimulate dialogue favoring the adequacy of language. Objective: To carry out a bibliographic survey about supplementary and alternative communication (SAC) in aphasic elderly. Methods: This study was carried out with publication inclusion criteria between 2014 and 2017, indexed in the SciELO, PubMed, MEDLINE and LILACS databases. The following keywords were selected in English: Aphasia; Supplementary and Alternative Communication; Speech therapy; Elderly; Language. Results and discussion: Most of the studies analyzed reported that CSA contributed to the more active interaction during communication and influenced the development of linguistic and social quality. Pictogram Ideogram Communication (PIC), Picture Communication Symbols (PCS), Bliss system and use of communicators and softwares are technological resources that can be used for aphasics in speech and language practice. Conclusion: The use of alternative supplementary communication allows a perspective of non-verbal language and its dimensions, being effective for the manifestations of aphasia, since it provides a better quality in communication becoming more effective mainly for the family environment and generating benefits before the development of various other skills.

Learning in a well-established paradigm of probabilistic category learning, the weather prediction task, has been assumed to be mediated by a variety of strategies reflecting explicit learning processes, such as hypothesis testing, when it is administered to young healthy participants. Higher categorization accuracy has been observed in the task when explicit processes are facilitated. We hypothesized that furnishing verbal labels for the cues would boost the formation, testing, and application of verbal rules, leading to higher categorization accuracy. We manipulated the availability of cue names by training separate groups of participants for three consecutive days to associate hard-to-name artificial auditory cues to pseudowords or to hard-to-name ideograms, or to associate stimulus intensity with colors; a fourth group remained unexposed to the cues. Verbal labels, cue individuation, and exposure to the stimulus set each had an additive effect on categorization performance in a subsequent 200-trial session of the weather prediction task using these auditory cues. This study suggests that cue nameability, when controlled for cue individuation and cue familiarity, has an effect on hypothesis-testing processes underlying category learning.

Japanese students with developmental disabilities often exhibit difficulties in reading, particularly in Kanji (ideogram) reading, and in acquiring the equivalence relations between pictures, written words, and sounds. Previous research suggested that one student with autism could acquire Kanji reading along with equivalence relations through stimulus pairing training. However, maintenance rates tended to be very low, possibly due to the lack of picture stimuli. In this study, we examined the acquisition and maintenance of Kanji reading skills through stimulus pairing training using corresponding pictures for six students with developmental disabilities. We prepared stimulus pairs consisting of picture stimuli that the students could name along with a corresponding Kanji character that they could not read. All students successfully acquired and maintained the Kanji reading skills through this procedure. These findings suggest that the nameability of picture stimuli in stimulus pairing training may facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of equivalence relations for reading.

This article aims to demonstrate the relationship between language and thought in the eastern culture. Given this relationship, it should examine how ideogrammatic writing influences the visual identity of Japanese packaging. The objective of this research is to identify the relationship between ideographic writing and the visual identity of Japanese packaging. It also try to determine at which level and aspect, the ideogrammatic language affects favorably or prejudice the design and the visual identity of the packaging of a product. This characteristic includes concepts of emotional and affective design and the messages they can transfer to the users. Established this association, it should consider how the diagrammatic writing influences the visual identity of the Japanese packaging.

It has been claimed that Chinese characters containing a woman radical (e.g., 姦jian1 ‘adultery’) tend to reflect negatively on women. We investigated this claim by asking Taiwan college students (24 men and 19 women) to rate the valence (1, 0, or -1) of 323 gender-based characters and their dictionary definitions. For men and women alike, characters with the son radical (k = 22) were rated more positively than characters with the woman radical (k = 103), although the latter also received a positive rating. Characters with the human radical (k = 198) were neutral. We conclude that gender inequality does not find itself in the gender-based characters. Whether it may be observed in other linguistic expressions of Chinese needs to be addressed with care.

This study investigated the neural mechanisms involved in the writing of Arabic numerals, kanji, and kana. Tasks involving writing numerals in Arabic, kanji, and, kana were administered to four patients with Gerstmann's syndrome and to five Wernicke aphasics. The results indicated that the ability to write Arabic numerals was well preserved in the Wernicke aphasics despite their serious phonological disturbances. The patients with Gerstmann's syndrome, who have a deficit with the concept of number, could write kanji numerals better than Arabic and kana numerals. Unlike Arabic numerals (ideogram) and kana (syllabogram), kanji (morphogram) have both semantic and phonetic values. The results suggested that Arabic numerals may be somesthetic and linked directly to the concept of number bypassing phonological analysis.

The digital paradigm to which these new technologies (NTIC) belong is at the origin of particular linguistic practices. Internet is an innovator in this field. Indeed, its users want their written communications to be as fast as during oral exchanges; they will choose their knowledge to write on a saving in expressive type. Also wishing to transmit feelings and emotions, they will call upon an iconography, which uses the diacritics as material serving creation of logograms. This redundancy of a diverted punctuation of its original use, but being used “to punctuate” the speech by figurines translating the emotional state of the speaker, is a characteristic of this numerical space. Through the analysis of the corpus taken on the Internet and put in comparison with the hieroglyphic system introduced by Champollion Le Jeune [5] and the graphic evolution of some ideograms, it will be shown that it is always about the same used model, in which a key always initiates a semantic field, and that this process orders a reorganization of the objects of the world through a new scriptural writing.

A 9-year-old boy diagnosed as having Williams syndrome was evaluated using psychological test batteries in order to clarify his ability in language and visual cognition. The subject had difficulty in writing some of the Japanese semantic characters (called Kanji) which he could otherwise read and understand. Although he could write the small components of which the Kanji characters were composed, he could not locate these correctly. This phenomenon is considered to be very similar to the difficulty in copying a figure observed clinically. The Kaufmann Assessment Batteries for Children clearly revealed that the boy had difficulty with the sub-test of spatial memory compared to his average score for simultaneous processing. This result is considered to be closely related to the difficulty in copying figures or writing Kanji characters. On the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the present authors found that the subject's vocabulary was relatively good, although semantic and pragmatic problems remained. Clarifying the strong and weak points of the abilities of such patients will help to determine the most appropriate mode of education for them.

Left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) and spatial agraphia are both caused by right hemisphere damage. However, effects of USN on spatial agraphia have not been fully investigated. This study examined performances of patients with or without neglect and normals on single letter writing, using Japanese unique writing systems, kana (phonogram) and kanji (ideogram). Our patients exhibited agraphia of kanji, but not of kana. However, accuracy of writing was not associated to neglect severity, and errors for writing to dictation occurred either on the left or right side of kanji. Right frontal damage seemed to be related to the genesis of duplication or omission errors of repeated elements. Effect of USN was limited to spatial arrangement of letters and copying performance.

The neural substrate of the dissociation between reading Japanese ideograms (Kanji) and phonograms (Kana) is currently unclear. To test whether spatial frequency (SF) information is responsible for this phenomenon, we recorded high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) with unfiltered or spatially filtered word stimuli in Japanese-speaking subjects. Kanji (early-learned, late-learned), Kana (word, non-word), and scrambled characters served as stimuli. Fourier analysis revealed that Kanji and Kana were characterized by high-SF (HSF) and low-SF (LSF) information, respectively. In ERPs with unfiltered stimuli, bilateral occipital P100, left occipitotemporal N170 and fronto-central N400 were elicited. Scrambled characters did not evoke left-lateralized N170 or clear N400. Under the LSF condition, P100 and N170 latencies for Kanji were significantly longer than those for Kana. In the HSF condition, P100 and N170 latencies for late-learned Kanji were significantly longer than those for early-learned Kanji. There was no significant difference in the N400 between Kanji and Kana in both SF conditions. These results suggest that early visual responses, but not the semantic component, are influenced by SF. This indicates a close link between Kana and LSF information, and between Kanji and HSF information. The differential effects of SF could underlie the neural basis of the differences between Kanji and Kana reading.

The stimulus equivalence paradigm was used to discover whether or not preexperimental histories with respect to affective stimuli could be brought to bear in an experimental setting. In two experiments, undergraduate students were trained in A-B, A-C, and D-C conditional relations using a match-to-sample procedure. The A and B stimuli were arbitrary visual forms, and the C stimuli were Chinese ideograms. The D stimuli for one group consisted of English words like “Holiday”, “Funeral”, and “Torture” and for the other group the D stimuli consisted of human faces expressing happiness, sadness, and anger. Equivalence relations were tested between the D stimuli and the B, A, and C stimuli with the condition that D stimuli used during testing were not the same as the D stimuli used during training. Thus, subjects trained with faces were tested with words and subjects trained with words were tested with faces. Substitutional equivalence emerged for most subjects who showed non-substitutional equivalence (B-C, C-B). Substitutional equivalence emerged more readily for subjects trained with words and tested with faces than they did for subjects trained with faces and tested with words. Results are discussed in terms of stimulus function and pre-experimental histories.

Handwriting is a complex daily activity that involves attention, memory, linguistic, cognitive and perceptual-motor skills. As motor act, writing a letter requires to retrieve the letter storing in memory, to access the corresponding motor program (letter global shape, relative size of letter strokes), to set the parameters for the program (absolute size of letters and writing speed) and to execute the program (muscles recruitment) (Ellis, 1988; Van Galen, 1991). The letter to be traced and the corresponding graphic motion are intimately related in handwriting activity. Because both reading and writing are learned simultaneously in school, it may be assumed that letters are both coded visually and under a sensorimotor form (Hulme, 1981). From this point of view, the most notable example is probably Chinese or Japanese ideograms, which are composed of a number of strokes that must be written in a precise order when learning to read and write. The metaphor “grammar of action” was proposed by Goodnow & Levine (1973) to define stroke composition rules. Subsequently, this order is used as a cue to retrieve the ideograms from memory (Flores d’Arcais, 1994), suggesting that the motor schema specific to each ideogram may be an essential component of their representation. Many others arguments in favour of the tight coupling between the visual and sensorimotor representations of letter shapes can be advanced. First, Anderson et al., (1990) describe the case of a patient whose inability to write letters can be associated with deficits in the visual identification of letters. By contrast, she could easily read all numbers and nonverbal symbols, and she was equally able to write numbers and perform written calculations without difficulty. In a same way, writing movements can help alexic patients whose reading abilities are impaired. When they were asked to trace the outline of the letters with their fingers, they sometimes succeeded in recognizing letters they were not able to recognize only visually (Bartolomeo et al., 2002; Seki et al., 1995). To go further on, some researchers investigated the question of the presence of a global cerebral network including visual and sensorimotor components and mediating a multimodal representation of letters. Longcamp and colleagues (2003) showed activations of a part of the left premotor area during passive observation of isolated letters although no motor response was required. The same zone was also activated when the 6

Previous works have postulated a similarity between music reading and text reading. Therefore it is interesting to evaluate both of these functions in an alexic subject. The patient investigated is a professional musician who had an ischemic lesion in the left temporoparieto-occipital region. Text reading showed pure alexia in which both the phonological and global routes were damaged. His ability to read correctly via matching tests showed that the word-form system was preserved. The reading of musical scores was damaged too and showed a dissociation between the reading of ideograms and rhythms (preserved) and the reading of notes (impaired). The results of note reading were analogous to those of word reading. Furthermore, the patient could read notes correctly via matching tests. On the basis of these findings, we propose a model of music reading where the reading of notes is based on a representational system analogous to that of words (the so-called internal language) whereas reading of ideograms and rhythms occurs via an internal representation unrelated to linguistic functions.

The Japanese writing system is unique in that it is composed of two different orthographies: kanji (morphograms) and kana (syllabograms). The retrieval of the visual orthographic representations of Japanese kanji is crucial to the process of writing in Japanese. We used low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to clarify the functional relevance of the left and right posterior inferior temporal cortex (PITC) to this process in native Japanese speakers. The experimental paradigms included the mental recall of kanji, kana-to-kanji transcription, semantic judgment, oral reading, and copying of kana and kanji. The first two tasks require the visualization of the kanji image of the word. We applied 0.9 Hz rTMS (600 total pulses) over individually determined left or right PITC to suppress cortical activity and measured subsequent task performance. In the mental recall of kanji and kana-to-kanji transcription, rTMS over the left PITC prolonged reaction times (RTs), whereas rTMS over the right PITC reduced RTs. In the other tasks, which do not involve the mental visualization of kanji, rTMS over the left or right PITC had no effect on performance. These results suggest that the left PITC is crucial for the retrieval of the visual graphic representation of kanji. Furthermore, the right PITC may work to suppress the dominant left PITC in the neural network for kanji writing, which involves visual word recognition.

Cortical areas used in the copying of Japanese ideographic characters and syllabic characters were studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy volunteers. Complexity of characters was controlled to illustrate differences resulting from character to sound conversion differences between the ideographic and syllabic characters. Statistical comparisons indicated extensive activation in the fusiform gyrus, posterior portions around the intraparietal sulcus and in the conjunction area of BA 6, 9 and 44 (which is assumed to be Exner's area) during the copying of ideographic characters. These findings suggested that indirectness between ideographic characters and their pronunciation demands extra processing such as semantic mediation and intensive grapheme processing in comparison with syllabic characters.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was successfully used to study the activation of the motor cortices during retrieval of Japanese ideogram, kanji. The subjects performed kanji completion tasks to generate a kanji in response to an element which is always written first. In most of the subjects, the contralateral premotor cortex, the presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and the bilateral intraparietal sulcus were activated during retrieval of kanji without actual writing nor intentional mental writing. Activation associated with actual writing was shown in the contralateral primary sensorimotor cortex and the SMA proper. These results suggested that retrieval of kanji would share the neural basis of motor representation with writing of kanji except for regions directly working for motor output.

A strongly right-handed Japanese man showed an unusual writing disorder associated with Broca-type aphasia after suffering a right hemispheric infarction. Writing with his right hand produced a fluent output in contrast to his nonfluent speech. The patient's agraphia disproportionately affected the writing of kana (Japanese syllabograms), leaving relatively intact the writing of kanji (Japanese ideograms). His kana agraphia, consisting of substitutions, intrusions, transpositions, and deletions, became apparent as the number of syllables in target words increased. Quantitative analysis of the substitutions in terms of their phonological similarity to the target revealed that most of the substitutions were phonologically dissimilar. Those errors were distributed almost identically for familiar and novel words. Moreover, the errors were observed asymmetrically across the target: more errors occurred near the end than at the beginning of a word. The kana agraphia in association with fluent writing output resulted in kana jargonagraphia. These observations suggest that our patient's selective kana jargonagraphia is best explained by selective damage to the hypothesized kana graphemic buffer and by disinhibition of the motor engrams of writing behavior, both of which resulted from right hemispheric damage.

Owing to the Japanese language's unique writing system, which consists of phonograms and ideograms, reading impairments of Japanese brain-damaged patients have attracted the interest of many researchers. Past case reports as well as some widely accepted handbooks and textbooks have concluded that a specific aphasia type or lesion site is associated with a particular impairment pattern of phonograms and ideograms in reading. However, the methodology and analytical procedures in previous studies were inadequate for reliable generalizations to be made. First, the test materials were unspecified or inappropriate, or the number of test items was small. Secondly, the conclusions were presented without providing individual performance data to support them. Thirdly, in associating patterns of reading impairment with lesion sites, only single cases were reported. The present investigation was designed to overcome the omissions of previous studies, and examined the ability to read 46 single phonograms and 46 single ideograms aloud in four groups of sufficiently large numbers of patients; namely, seven pure alexics, 23 Broca aphasics, 13 Wernicke aphasics, and seven patients with alexia and agraphia. Ours are the first data to demonstrate unequivocally no consistent linkage between aphasia type and the patterns of impairment of phonogram and ideogram reading. The impairment patterns were not uniform across patients even in the same aphasia group. A majority of the cases in each group showed that phonograms and ideograms were unselectively impaired. However, ideogram reading was more difficult in three cases in the pure alexia and Broca aphasia groups, respectively, and in one case in the Wernicke aphasia group. Phonogram reading was more severely disturbed in four cases among the Broca aphasics and in one case among the patients with alexia with agraphia. An apparent variability of impairment patterns characterized the Broca aphasic group. These dyslexic patterns did not appear to correlate with the site and extent of lesions identified by computerized tomography scans. Past reports linking a particular impairment pattern of phonogram and ideogram reading and a specific lesion site were studies of single cases, and their conclusions seem oversimplified. While sensory and motor dysfunctions can usually be neuroanatomically localized in individuals, impairments of certain high cortical functions, such as the reading of phonograms and ideograms, may not be correlated with damage to definite neuroanatomical structures.

Optic aphasia is a rare syndrome in which patients are unable to name visually presented objects but have no difficulty in naming those objects on tactile or verbal presentation. We report a 79-year-old man who exhibited anomic aphasia after a left posterior cerebral artery territory infarction. His naming ability was intact on tactile and verbal semantic presentation. The results of the systematic assessment of visual processing of objects and letters indicated that he had optic aphasia with mixed features of visual associative agnosia. Interestingly, although he had difficulty reading Hanja (an ideogram), he could point to Hanja letters on verbal description of their meaning, suggesting that the processes of recognizing objects and Hanja share a common mechanism.

Korean written language is composed of ideogram (Hanja) and phonogram (Hangul), as Japanese consists of Kanji (ideogram) and Kana (phonogram). Dissociation between ideogram and phonogram impairment after brain injury has been reported in Japanese, but few in Korean. We report a 64-yr-old right-handed man who showed alexia with agraphia in Hanja but preserved Hangul reading and writing after a left posterior inferior temporal lobe infarction. Interestingly, the patient was an expert in Hanja; he had been a Hanja calligrapher over 40 yr. However, when presented with 65 basic Chinese letters that are taught in elementary school, his responses were slow both in reading (6.3 sec/letter) and writing (8.8 sec/letter). The rate of correct response was 81.5% (53 out of 65 letters) both in reading and writing. The patient's performances were beyond mean-2SD of those of six age-, sex-, and education-matched controls who correctly read 64.7 out of 65 and wrote 62.5 out of 65 letters with a much shorter reaction time (1.3 sec/letter for reading and 4.0 sec/letter for writing). These findings support the notion that ideogram and phonogram can be mediated in different brain regions and Hanja alexia with agraphia in Korean patients can be associated with a left posterior inferior temporal lesion.

• It has been proposed that the comprehension of written language requires transcoding from the visual (grapheme) to the auditory (phoneme). It has also been proposed that visual word images can be comprehended without grapheme-phoneme transcoding. We describe three aphasic patients with left hemisphere impairment who had poor speech comprehension but could comprehend written language. One of these patients had a subsequent right hemisphere lesion and lost his ability to read. We propose that the right hemisphere in some individuals may be capable of extracting semantic information from iconic images (ideogram) without phonological processing.

We report a series of experiments which compare the ways in which Japanese and English children read and write single words. The Japanese children read and wrote the words in two types of script, kana and kanji. The first of these consists of symbols which signify syllables, and the second entirely of ideograms. Both groups read and wrote words with and without concurrent vocalization. Concurrent vocalization had no apparent effect on reading or writing kanji: nor did it affect reading English words. But it did consistently impede reading and writing kana words and it did impair writing English. We conclude, tentatively, that English children may read words without the help of prelexical phonological analysis, but that they spell them on the basis of sound-symbol relationships. We also conclude that there may be no such sharp distinction between reading and writing in either of the two types of Japanese script.

Chinese characters presented tachistoscopically to young readers of minimal reading ability and to young readers of better ability produce reliable differences in recognition thresholds in favor of the good readers. Simultaneous presentations of compared characters also reduces perceptual thresholds as compared to successive presentation with minimal readers being inferior to good readers on the successive task. Chinese characters have been used as intermediaries in reading and improved performance attributed to the fact that the Chinese characters are related to words as units rather than to phonemic elements as in the Roman alphabet. However, since visual factors also appear to be involved in recognition of Chinese characters in a manner distinguishing between minimal and good young readers, absence of phonemic word structure may not be responsible for the improvement arising from substitution of the Chinese for Roman script.

A new syndrome of 'pure agraphia for Kanji' is described in 3 Japanese subjects with lesions in the left posteroinferior temporal region. Kanji (ideogram or morphogram) can be compared with orthographically irregular or ambiguous words in some European languages, since it is impossible to write Kanji characters unless each one of them is learned and memorized. In contrast, Kana (phonogram or syllabogram) words are comparable with orthographically regular words or nonsense words, because the Kana writing system depends on strict phonological rules (almost one-to-one correspondence between syllable and syllabogram). We conclude that 'lexical agraphia' reported in European languages can also be observed in the Japanese language where it is expressed as 'pure agraphia for Kanji'. 'Lexical agraphia' is a useful concept with general application regardless of language system.

This study was concerned with the ideogram reading performances of groups of reading disabled and normal children. While adults with acquired alexia have associated defects in ideogram reading, all of the dyslexic children performed at normal adult levels. It was found that ideogram reading in control children is rather slow to develop, with only 7 and 8 year old subjects performing like normal adults; this is in contrast to other reading-related cognitive tasks in which normal performance develops earlier.

Two experiments on the identification of ideographs are reported. In Expt 1 subjects showed a right visual field advantage when reporting Arabic numerals. A right visual field advantage was also obtained in Expt 2 when Chinese and Japanese subjects reported numbers presented in Arabic and Kanji formats. The results are discussed in the context of the literature which shows a left visual field advantage for the identification of single ideographs in Chinese and Japanese, and a right visual field advantage for items in alphabetic and syllabic scripts. It is suggested that it is not the direct mapping between ideographs and the morphemes of a language which yields a left visual field advantage, but associated incidental stimulus characteristics which make demands upon preprocessing operations that are carried out more efficiently in the right hemisphere. It is argued, therefore, that this literature does not address the question of whether, subsequent to preprocessing, alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic scripts are processed by dissociable mechanisms.

In a naming experiment Chinese subjects showed no significant visual field advantage for naming tachistoscopically presented Chinese characters. However, both Chinese and North American subjects tended to discriminate characters presented in the left visual field more accurately. The results are discussed in terms of the theories of hemispheric specialization.

It has been repeatedly shown that the left hemisphere (right visual field) is superior to the right hemisphere (LVF) in reading English, a bias possibly due to any or all of three confounded factors: (1) the symbolic nature of the coding system; (2) the analytic requirements of the decoding process; and (3) the phonological associations of the elements. Recent work on reading Japanese ideograms (Kanji) disentangles (1) from (2) and (3), but leaves the latter two confounded. We further disentangle (2) and (3) by examining visual field preference for reading musical chords, representatives of an analytic, nonphonological symbol system. The strong RVF advantage is interpreted as indicating that the left hemisphere is dominant for reading an analytic symbol system that is not phonologically based. We conclude that the left-hemisphere advantage traditionally found for reading phonological symbols is due to their analytic nature in addition to any effect due to their linguistic association.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the lateralization of hemispheric functions. In experiment 1 single Chinese characters, English words and random dot forms were used as stimuli presented to the left or right visual field of adults. In experiment 2 adults and school children were asked to recognize single characters presented in one field and Arabic numerals in the opposite field. The results indicated that adults and children all showed left hemisphere superiority in the recognition of characters. Some possible causes were given to explain why Chinese characters, being an ideographic language, showed a similar superiority as phonetic languages.

We present a Japanese man with selective Kana (phonogram) agraphia as a sequels of two cerebral infarctions in a part of the left angular gyros and its adjoining posterior superior temporal gyros and the left corona radiata. The agraphia of this patient showed the following features: (1) His writing difficulty was greater for Kana than for Kanji (ideogram) when a word was polysyllabic. (2) Kana errors consisted of perseveration and substitution with another letter, resulting in jargon agraphia. (3) This jargon agraphia often contained a correct number of letters for a target word. Based on these findings, we speculate that the basic defect of this agraphia lies in the process of converting an acoustic word image into a Kana motor grapheme sequence.

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere advantage reported in the literature for single Chinese or kanji characters is the result of perceptual factors rather than unique linguistic features of the orthography. However, no similar right hemisphere advantage for two-character words has ever been found. This study reports on a right hemisphere advantage for high stroke number low frequency two-character Chinese words with short exposure time and low luminance. While there is support for the perceptual-factors explanation for some findings of right hemisphere advantage for Chinese, it is suggested that linguistic factors can still play a part.

Three cases of schizophrenia with ideographic neologisms in Japanese are presented and compared with aphasic neologisms reported in Japanese literature. Schizophrenic neologisms are different from aphasic neologisms in nature. The contrast becomes obvious when both are compared in Japanese writing based on the dual writing system of kanji (Chinese characters, ideogram) and kana (phonetic characters, syllabogram).

This study was concerned with a model for kanji reading applicable in a non-Japanese population of aphasics. The experimental task required aphasic subjects to match animals with their footprints, a type of ideogram "reading" requiring no special training. As is true for kanji, footprint reading defects were consistently associated with word reading impairment, but some aphasics with defects in word reading performed normally in footprint reading. All with defects in footprint reading were also impaired in letter recognition or pantomime recognition. One aphasic's pattern of symptoms was quite similar to the rare phenomenon of Gogi aphasia. Implications for kanji alexia are discussed.

Subjects made a number-non-number classification for single numbers or non-numbers presented either in the left or right visual field. A right visual field advantage was observed both for numbers written ideographically (Arabic numerals) and alphabetically. The laterality effect was stronger for the alphabetic than for the ideographic script, but the interaction with visual field failed to reach statistical significance. The results are discussed in the framework of other studies contrasting the processing of logographic and phonographic scripts as a function of the visual field. © 1985 The Experimental Psychology Society, Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The reading of three Japanese patients who had undergone section of the splenium of the corpus callosum for pineal tumours was examined by the tachistoscopic technique. Oral reading of isolated words and their comprehension (matching of words to pictures) in the left visual half-field were found to be impaired 1 yr post-operatively both for ideograms and for phonograms. Two or three years after operation, retests indicated that the deficit (unilateral alexia) was comparatively restricted to the reading of phonograms. It is argued that unilateral alexia is not due to a disorder in the visual perception of words.

A case of disconnection-type agraphia coupled with alexia was reported. The patient showed several asymmetrical manual capacities between the two hands, i.e., dissociated difficulty of Kanji (ideogram) writing between the two hands, left unilateral difficulty of Kana (phonogram) writing, right unilateral dyscopia of letters as well as geometrical figures, and right unilateral difficulty in drawing without a model. Anatomically, lesions involved most of the corpus callosum in its posterior portion including the splenium and the left medial occipital lobe. From these data, a possible liguistic capacity of the right hemisphere was suggested.

Summary Fifty aphasic and 30 non-aphasic hemiplegic patients, screened for visuo-motor or visuo-spatial problems, performed a task of writing 20 high-frequency nouns designating familiar objects. For 10 of the nouns (non-imported words), the subject was required to write both in kanji (ideogram) and in hiragana (one type of phonogram) and for the other 10 (imported words) in katakana (another type of phonogram). Combined visual-auditory stimuli (the picture of the words and the names of the pictures spoken by the examiner) were employed for eliciting responses from the subject. Any response which fell short of the standard orthography of a given word was scored as an error and subjected to a detailed analysis. (The scates of the six aphasic subjects, which showed either zero error or 100% errors on the whole test, were excluded from the analysis.) The results may be summarized as follows: (1) In the kanji transcriptions of non-imported words, both the aphasic and non-aphasic groups made errors, the former group making a larger mean percentage of errors (38%) than the latter group (22%). (2) In the kana transcriptions of both imported and non-imported words, only the aphasic group made errors, the mean percentage errors being 53% for the former and 57% for the latter. (3) The types of kanji errors exhibited by both aphasic and non-aphasic groups were essentially similar to each other, "graphical confusions" being the most frequent type. (4) The types of kana errors, exhibited exclusively by the aphasic subjects, were quite different from those of kanji errors; “phonological confusion” accounted for the most of the errors while there was only a negligible amount of “graphical confusion.” (5) No correlation was found between the respective levels of performance of the aphasic patients in the kanji and kana tasks, indicating that the processing of kanji and kana can be impaired independently in different patients. (6) The aphasics with apraxia of speech showed, as a group, a significantly greater number of errors in the kana transcription of words than did the aphasics without it. These findings provide support for the hypothesis proposed therein, in part duplicating the previous result ( Sasanuma and Fujimura, 1971 ), that kana and kanji transcriptions can be processed in different modes, the former involving a “phonological processor”" and the latter without one.