[Effect of number of syllables in word repetition]

We report a case of non-fluent conduction aphasia. The patient was a 59-year-old right-handed male. He suffered from aphasia after a left internal carotid artery occlusion. MRI study revealed subcortical lesions in the left inferior frontal gyrus and cortical lesion in the anterior part of the left insular gyrus and the left postcentral gyrus. The patient showed good comprehension of words and daily conversation but had a common difficulty in the following tasks; naming of pictures, repetition of words, reading of kanji and kana letters. In these tasks, the phonological output of the patient contained many literal paraphasias and there was a tendency that errors appeared more in the posterior portion of a target word. We analyzed the position of errors in the target word on word repetition tasks. The result confirmed the above observation. We speculate that the length of a target word may have played a critical rote in this patient's repetition capability.