[Japanese-applied melodic intonation therapy for Broca aphasia]

Since Albert et al. (1973) published Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), this new technique for Broca type aphasics has won a good reputation because of its remarkable efficiency. Many improved cases have been reported. On the contrary, there seems to be no study on MIT in Japan. This gap may be mainly caused by the great difference between two languages which makes difficult to apply original MIT to Japanese language. Through a comparative study of two languages, we have made some amendments on original MIT, which just fit for Japanese. MIT is designed to generate verbal output by embedding target phrases and sentences in a simple, nonliguistically loaded melody pattern. The pattern is consisted of the melody line, the rhythm, and points of stress. Now let us explain our Japanese version of MIT concerning these three elements. As for melody line, our version has only two pitches; high and low, since Japanese language has a pitch accent which is decided in each word. As a result, the melody line of Japanese version is far more simple than the original one, which has four pitches. The rhythm of English is called "stress-timed rhythm", which means that a part between two syllables that have primary stresses tends to be spoken at regular intervals regardless of the number of syllables between them. Consequently, the tempo of speech varies depending on the number of syllables between them. On the other hand, Japanese has "syllable-timed rhythm", which means isosyllabic.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)