As an aside from my main post below on Sanskrit, I found a different topic that is related to language that I find absolutely fascinating and puzzling. I remember hearing about it during middle school, and after coming across the same topic in a news article, I wanted to blog about it: There is an extremely rare syndrome, Foreign Accent Syndrome (60 cases in the last 65 years), in which individuals suffer brain damage, such as a seizure, migraine, or surgery, and subsequently speak with a completely different accent. Recently, for example, one British woman (with a British accent) suffered a terrible migraine and once it subsided, spoke with a thick Chinese accent.
I wonder how this change in accent after a seizure/migraine/brain surgery relates to language. Because these people do not acquire a new language, I would hypothesize that accent and language are separately represented in the brain. However, I find it puzzling that generally speaking, people from a certain part of the world who often speak a certain language end up having the same accent when speaking English. Are accents tied to location, culture, language, or something else?
Anyway...thought this was interesting and puzzling, so I wanted to post it to learn more and hear all of your thoughts!
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-foreign-accent-syndrome,0,7971719.story
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/teen-wakes-coma-speaking-fluent-german/story?id=10395859
ReplyDeleteA new article actually showing how a woman lost her ability to speak her native language, Croatia, after having a stroke. Instead, she is now speaking German.
I agree that this phenomenon is very interesting. Indeed, the article about the Croatian girl losing her ability to speak her native language but not her second language provides a little bit of insight about this.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read so far, I learned that different realms of the human brain are responsible for learning different languages. When younger children learn their first language. for instance, a realm of the brain, called procedural memory, is responsible. This memory holds things that we do without having to think, such as walking, jumping etc. So when children are learning their first language, for them it is learning how to walk or jump. They don't memorize; they just take in what they hear and see. On the other hand, when older children and adults learn a second language, a different realm of the brain, called declarative memory, is responsible. And it requires memorization and studying.
Since two different parts of the brain are responsible for holding the first and second language, it is possible that the Croatian girl loses her native language but not the second one.
I believe this reasoning correlates with what you suggested about different parts of the brain being responsible for different aspects of the language learning.
What's also important in this article is the claim that the accents acquired after such accidents/injuries are not actually French, Chinese, Slavic, etc. accents but actually just speech impairments that make them sound foreign.
ReplyDelete