Effectiveness of One-Character Hiragana Writing Training Using One-Kanji-Character Keywords

Abstract

We provided one-character Hiragana writing training using Kanji keywords to a patient with chronic fluent aphasia. In the training (40 min/session, 35 sessions, 4.5 months), monosyllabic words written in one Kanji character were used as keywords, and compound words or short sentences containing this Kanji character were used as hints to reinforce meaning recall. In this way, the patient was able to write 31 of 44 Hiragana. The writing of one Hiragana character was related with the ability to recall Kanji keywords and hints. Upon examining the character-level attributes affecting the ability to write one Kana character, the number of strokes of the Kanji keywords was extracted. After the one-character Hiragana writing training, we conducted word-level training (40 min/session, 14 sessions, 2 months). As a result of the word-level writing training of 20 two-character words combining the 31 Hiragana characters that the patient could write because of the one-character Hiragana writing training, the number of writable words increased from 3, before the training, to 17, after the training. These two results suggest that considering the number of strokes of the Kanji keyword is necessary and training of words that have a small number of characters after the one-character Hiragana writing training is important.