Japanese aphasia: Gogi, kanji, kana, kuku

Gogi, or word meaning aphasia, refers to selective impairment of kanji pprocessing. Kanji is text from ideographs as opposed to kana, which is phonologic writing, with a 1:1 correspondence between sound and script for each mora or syllable. Gogi aphasia was first described by Imura T (Aphasia: characteristic symptoms in Japanese. Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica 47: 196-218 1943). Gogi aphasic patients have preservation of kana processing, difficulty in comprehension, in the retrieval of content words (ie lexical items), and fluent oral repetition. One author compares it to the mixed form of transcortical aphasia (Goldstein K, Die transcortikalen aphasien. Fishcer, Jena, 1917), to Luria's semantic aphasia, or Geschwind, Quadfasel and Segarra's isolation of the speech area. A patient reported by Sasanuma and Monoi (after a traumatic hemorrhage) (Neurology 1975) could repeat without comprehension. He did poorly on sentencite comprehension, auditory comprehension but had preserved comprehension of numbers. He had fluent speech with normal prosody and loss of content words. He made numerous "unrelated" errors on confrontation naming. He pwherformed at 95 % on the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (Japanese version). He produced well formed but semantically empty sentences, and could repeat orally normally. Reading was impaired in kanji and kana in term s of comprehension, but he could read most kana words aloud but not kanji. Japanese on and kun reading of kanji requires semantic knowledge to read. Also, Japanese text does not have word boundaries except semanticallepy deduced by kana and kanji words, so one has to rely on semantics to know the correct boundaries (which take the place of commas, periods and spaces in English). Gogi aphasics who lack comprehension place pauses at the wrong loci eg in the middle of a morpheme. Writing was impaired in both kana and kanji with kanji worse. Writing to dictation in kana was relatively preserved, whereas kanji was awful. Kanji errors were made in which kanji chthe aracters which are ideograms were treated as though they were phonetic with phonetic errors in substitutions made. Number concept and calculation was preserved. Reviewing the literature, all but one of six cases spared "parietal" signs such as angular gyrus symptoms, constructional apraxia, or visuomotor impairment. The author posits impairment of kana processing, in contrast as being in Broca's area, whereas Gogi aphasia may represent impaired second or third temporal gyri or underlying white matter but sparing the "Wernicke-Broca" complex(Neurology 25: 627-632, 1975).

Kuku is a mnemonic rhyme by which Japanese learn the multiplication tables via ther auditory route. Patients with impaired kuku learning relearned multiplication tables using the visual route. (Kashiwagi et al. Neduropsychologia 1987).


For those English speakers who want to impress your audiences when you give a lecture, kana is further divided into katakan (imported words) and hiragana (nonimported or native words). Generally there is no difference in performance in the two types.

Another article analyzed error types in kana and kanji . Patients with kanji aphasia had "word (graphical) confusion" whereas kana aphasics had "phonologic confusion." However there were significantly less vowel errors than consonant errors in kana, and those vowel errors that occurred also had a substitution error in the preceding consonant. Patients with kana aphasia typically had apraxia of speech (80%) whereas patients with kanji aphasia did not. (Sasanuma S, Fujimura O. An analysis of writing errors in Japanese aphasic patients: kanji v. kana words).

Yet another article compared writing Arabic numerals, kani and kana in brain damaged patients (Tamara I, Kikuchi S, OtsukiM, Tashiro K. Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Neuroreport 14:861-865, 2003). 4 patients with Gerstmann's syndrome and 4 with Wernicke's aphasia were studied. Wernicke's aphasics could write Arabic numerals, but Gerstmann's patients could write kanji numbers better than Arabic numbers. The authors speculate that Arabic numerals are somesthetic and linked to concept of number processing and bypass phonological analysis.

Sugishita M, Otomo K, Kabe S, Yunoki K. A critical appraisalof neuropsychological correlates of Japanese ideogram (kanji) and phonogram (kana) reading (Brain 1992; 115:1563-1585) looked at 23 patients with Broca aphasia, 13 Wernicke's and 7 with alexia and agraphia and did not find a relationship between aphasia pattern and lesion site, contrary to previous smallcase series.