Fifty aphasic and 30 non-aphasic hemiplegic patients, screened for visuo-motor or visuo-spatial problems, performed a task of writing 20 high-frequency nouns designating familiar objects. For 10 of the nouns (non-imported words), the subject was required to write both in kanji (ideogram) and in hiragana (one type of phonogram) and for the other 10 (imported words) in katakana (another type of phonogram). Combined visual-auditory stimuli (the picture of the words and the names of the pictures spoken by the examiner) were employed for eliciting responses from the subject. Any response which fell short of the standard orthography of a given word was scored as an error and subjected to a detailed analysis. (The scates of the six aphasic subjects, which showed either zero error or 100% errors on the whole test, were excluded from the analysis.) The results may be summarized as follows: (1) In the kanji transcriptions of non-imported words, both the aphasic and non-aphasic groups made errors, the former group making a larger mean percentage of errors (38%) than the latter group (22%). (2) In the kana transcriptions of both imported and non-imported words, only the aphasic group made errors, the mean percentage errors being 53% for the former and 57% for the latter. (3) The types of kanji errors exhibited by both aphasic and non-aphasic groups were essentially similar to each other, "graphical confusions" being the most frequent type. (4) The types of kana errors, exhibited exclusively by the aphasic subjects, were quite different from those of kanji errors; “phonological confusion” accounted for the most of the errors while there was only a negligible amount of “graphical confusion.” (5) No correlation was found between the respective levels of performance of the aphasic patients in the kanji and kana tasks, indicating that the processing of kanji and kana can be impaired independently in different patients. (6) The aphasics with apraxia of speech showed, as a group, a significantly greater number of errors in the kana transcription of words than did the aphasics without it. These findings provide support for the hypothesis proposed therein, in part duplicating the previous result ( Sasanuma and Fujimura, 1971 ), that kana and kanji transcriptions can be processed in different modes, the former involving a “phonological processor”" and the latter without one.