Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the spelling processing patterns in patients with subcortical vascular dementia (SVaD) and subcortical vascular mild cognitive impairment (svMCI).Methods: The subjects consisted of 10 patients with SVaD, 15with svMCI, and 30 normal controls (NC) subjects. Prior to this study, Korean- Mini Mental Status Examination (K-MMSE), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA-K), and health screening questionnaires were conducted as pre-tests. After that, subjects were presented with 20 words grouped according to word type (regular word, irregular word, non-word), and then they were asked to dictate the words they heard. After the tests were completed, the number of correct responses and the number of error patterns were compared between groups.Results: First, by word type between groups, the svMCI and SVaD groups showed a significantly lower number of correct responses for regular and irregular words compared to the NC group. In addition, the SVaD group showed a significantly lower number of forward responses than the svMCI group in irregular words. Non-words showed significantly lower number of forward responses in the SVaD group compared to the NC and svMCI groups. Second, the comparison of the number of error types between groups showed a significant difference between the three groups in terms of grapheme substitution; and the SVaD group showed significantly more errors compared with the NC and svMCI groups in addition and omission of graphemes. Third, the SVaD group showed significantly more errors in comparison to the NC and svMCI groups for phonological implausible errors, and the svMCI and SVaD groups showed significantly more errors than the NC group for phonological plausible errors. Fourth, lexicalization errors within non-words were observed only in the SVaD group.Conclusion: For early detection of svMCI, it is necessary to pay attention to irregular word performance.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the performance on a word-chain task across two age groups (youth: 20~39 years and middle-aged groups: 40~64 years).Methods: In the word-chain task, we analyzed the number of correct responses and reaction times (time from the final consonant/vowel of the previous word to the initial consonant/vowel of the second syllable of the next word). The correlation between the ability of word-chain task and Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT), Korean-Mini Mental State Examination, Short form-Korean-Boston Naming Test, Korean-Trail Making Test-Elderly (K-TMT-E) (A,B) & Digit Symbol Coding (DSC) were analyzed.Results: The following results were obtained: (i) with increasing age, the number of the correct responses in the word-chain task’s (<i>p</i> < 0.001) and that of COWAT (<i>p</i> < 0.001) gradually declined; (ii) with increasing age, the number of DSC produced gradually declined (<i>p</i> < 0.001) and response time of K-TMT-E (A,B) also gradually increased; (iii) in both groups, the total number of correct responses of the word-chain task correlated with the number of correct responses of COWAT; (iv) the middle-aged group showed a correlation between the word-chain task and DSC.Conclusion: The ability on the word-chain task might reflect aging and cognitive changes in normal adults.

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) occasionally complain of difficulties in conversation. A conversation is a type of communication between the speaker and listener, and several elements are required for a conversation to take place. However, it is unclear which of those elements affect communication in patients with RHD. Therefore, we prospectively enrolled 11 patients with right hemispheric damage due to acute cerebral infarction, within 1 week of onset. To evaluate patients’ conversational abilities, we used a structured conversation task, namely, the “Hallym Conversation and Pragmatics Protocol”. The topics of conversation were “family”, “leisure”, and “other/friends”. The conversation characteristics were classified according to three indices: the “conversational participation index”, “topic manipulation index”, and “conversational breakdown index”. Patients with RHD were compared with 11 age-, sex-, and years of education-matched healthy adults. The most common site of damage in the patients with RHD was the periventricular white matter. There was no significant difference in performance between the two groups according to the conversation participation index and in the discontinuance rate assessed with the conversational breakdown index. However, patients with RHD showed a lower topic maintenance rate and higher topic initiation and topic switching rates, according to the topic manipulation index. Therefore, we explored the characteristics of impaired conversation abilities in patients with RHD by assessing their ability to converse and manage topics during structured conversations, and found difficulties with pragmatics and communication discourse in these patients.