Objectives: Impaired repetition is one of the major symptoms of several aphasias, expecially  conduction aphasia. Repetition deficit is distinct from other language disorders such as anomia and dyslexia. A deep understanding of the etiology of repetition impairment could potentially improve rehabilitation strategies for aphasia . There are many findings about repetition have been obtained mainly in investigations of alphabetic languages (e.g. English and Italian). On the other hand , there have been few studies of non-alphabetic languages (e.g. Chinese). In this study, we tried to investigate the causes of repetition deficits by analyzing the performances of two Chinese speakers with conduction aphasia. 
Methods: This study recruited two patients with conduction aphasia, with mild impairment of listening, understanding and articulatiohn and disproportionate impairment of repetition function due to ischemic damage. For each patient, the following three aspects were assessed during the stable phase of the disease:  phonological input, phonological output and  short-term memory .
Results: The two patients performed normally in all speech input tasks. One patient exhibited difficulty with all speech production tasks (correct response rate, 54–75%) despite intact short-term memory capacity (memory span value, 3–8). The other patient had severe deficits in nonword repetition (correct response rate, 62%) and short-term memory (memory span value, 1–2), although he performed normally in other speech production tasks (correct response rate, 92–100%).
Conclusion: The repetition impairment of the two cases in this study had distinctive causes: disrupted phonological output processing and reduced short-term memory capacity. Our studies suggested there are many differences in the causes of repetition dysfunction in conduction aphasia between alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages.

Preliminary study on causes of oral repetition deficits: Evidence from Chinese speakers with conduction aphasia