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Englishman Speaks Fluent Welsch After Stroke, and Other Similar Cases
The Englishman. (Telegraph/Screenshot)
A Englishman can speak fluent Welsch after suffering a stroke.
Alun Morgan, 81, was in Wales after evacuation during World War II but left when he was 11, according to The Telegraph.
“I’d not lived in Wales since I was evacuated there during the war. Gradually the English words came back, but it wasn’t easy,” he said.
Morgan was watching the news around noon one day when his wife noticed he had slipped into a paralyzed state; he was rushed to the hospital.
After coming out of it he began speaking fluent Welsch.
Doctors say this condition is called aphasia, where brain damage shifts the brain’s language center.
A study close to 2000 found the right side of the brain learns language skills after strokes. Images showed that areas in the right side of the brain became active during language activities instead of their normal left side counterparts.
“This is the first demonstration that learning and, by extension, speech therapy change the way compensatory pathways in the brain work,” said Maurizio Corbetta, M.D., head of stroke and brain injury rehabilitation, in a Science Daily story. “This study supports the hypothesis that brain pathways in the right hemisphere are directly involved in the recovery of language after stroke.”
Yet that recovery doesn’t explain how people like Morgan start speaking languages fluently which they haven’t previously been able to, or speaking in completely different accents.
Other similar cases within the last several years include a woman who suffers from chronic migraines being left talking in a Chinese accent, and a woman un the United Kingdom left speaking with what sounds like a French accent about suffering a serious migraine.
A doctor explains the so-called Foriegn Accent Syndrome. (BBC/Screenshot)
These cases, called the “Foriegn Accent Syndrome,” apparently include both cases like Morgan’s and the accent cases.
“This syndrome results in a very particular constellation of changes to the way a person speaks,”said Professor Sophie Scott, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.
“They do not actually develop a whole new accent, it is the listener who attaches a particular label to what they are hearing. In the UK people are most likely to say someone with Foreign Accent Syndrome sounds French or German, while in the US people are mostly likely to be told they sound British.”
This strikes the victims, in some cases, hard.
”My voice has started to annoy me now,” said Sarah Colwill, an Englishwoman who started speaking in a heavy Far Eastern accent. “It is not my voice.”
As for Morgan’s case, doctors there claim he has suffered aphasia, along with about a third of the yearly 150,000 stroke victims.
Strokes can lead to personality and physical changes, and with a stroke blood supply to the brain gets cut off, leading to potential damage to areas starved for oxygen, according to Chris Clark, Strok Assocation UK’s director of Life after Stroke Service.
“Aphasia is caused by damage to the areas of the brain responsible for language,” he said. “As a result, individuals who were previously able to communicate through speaking, understanding, reading and writing become more limited in their ability to do so.”
