The syndrome of Gogi (word‐meaning) aphasia

In 1943, Imura described an aphasic syndrome shown by Japanese patients and designated it as Gogi ("word-meaning") aphasia. Salient features are selective impairment of processing kanji or Chinese characters and difficulty in finding access to the lexicon in both production and reception, with preservation of processing kana or phonetic signs, and fluent oral repetition. A patient with this syndrome is presented, with emphasis on the nature of his kanji impairment. Cases of Gogi aphasia in the literature are reviewed and contrasted to cases of Broca's aphasia with selective impairment of kana processing. The implications for a neurolinguistic model of language processing in aphasia are discussed.