Kanji versus Kana processing in alexia with transient agraphia: a case report.

Summary A 43 year old, right-handed, Japanese school teacher exhibited the syndrome of alexia with transient agraphia as a result of a cerebrovascular accident (suspected infarction of the posterior cerebral artery of the left hemisphere). A detailed examination of the syndrome revealed among other things that two types of orthographic symbols in Japanese, kana (“syllabic” symbols) and kanji (“ideographic” symbols), were impaired in different manners, i.e., the patient used different strategies in trying to retrieve graph-meaning associations of words written in each type of symbols. The finding was interpreted to indicate that the processing of kana and kanji represents distinctively different modes of operations of linguistic behavior. The additional non-verbal symptoms exhibited by the patient included color naming difficulty, topographical disorientation, impairment in written calculation, and visuoperceptual and visuoconstructional disabilities. Most of these symptoms were transient in nature, however, and disappeared during the first few months after onset of illness.