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Language Amnesia

  Tags: Brain | Memory
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4204 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 1 of 4
07 January 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged 
Recently came across a video documentary on YouTube:
Aussie woke up from a coma speaking only Mandarin (The
Feed)


A young man Ben McMahon from Australia was in a car accident. He woke up sometime later and started speaking
fluent Mandarin to the Chinese nurse. Originally his Mandarin in school was only at the basic level. After his brief
coma for a few days he only spoke to people including his parents in Mandarin. Later he entered into a local
Chinese competition and ended up representing Australia as a foreigner speaking Mandarin in China.

I've heard a similar story on radio an American veteran who served in the Vietnam war was captured over 30 years
ago and tortured in a N. Vietnamese prison. He eventually stayed and married a local. Many years later the man
had a reunion with his sister in this part of the world but had to rely on a Vietnamese interpreter. His sister was
certain that the man she met was his brother who stayed behind... except due to a traumatic experience lost all
ability to speak English.

Anybody knows someone who had a traumatic experience and lost the ability to speak a language?
3 persons have voted this message useful



Hekje
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4463 days ago

842 posts - 1330 votes 
Speaks: English*, Dutch
Studies: French, Indonesian

 
 Message 2 of 4
07 January 2014 at 10:53pm | IP Logged 
shk00design wrote:
He woke up sometime later and started speaking fluent Mandarin to the Chinese nurse.
Originally his Mandarin in school was only at the basic level.

I think this is a bit misleading. Yes, he spoke Mandarin after the accident, but the video makes no claims about him
waking up magically speaking better than before. His level improved when he started studying Mandarin on his own
and taking a university class.

I also wouldn't describe this as language amnesia per se, since he never forgot English. He certainly speaks it
flawlessly in the video.

(If this wasn't what you were implying, I apologize for assuming.)
2 persons have voted this message useful



shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4204 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 3 of 4
08 January 2014 at 6:14am | IP Logged 
Hekje wrote:
I think this is a bit misleading. Yes, he spoke Mandarin after the accident, but the video makes
no claims about him waking up magically speaking better than before. His level improved when he started
studying Mandarin on his own and taking a university class.


You made a good point. The word "amnesia" seemed a bit misleading because he never forgot his English.
However... in the brief period after his car accident he spoke only Mandarin to the nurse and wrote things down
on paper in Chinese to his family which the nurse had to translate back to other family members. Even Ben himself
claimed that his level was pretty basic before his accident so I wouldn't assume someone would all of a sudden be
speaking and writing only in the language he's not good at. For a brief period of 1 to a few days there was some
signs of "amnesia" until English came back, though not a longterm condition.

Twenty-one -year old recovers from coma and moves into
Chinese cult status

The first line in the article reads:
A UNIVERSITY student who spoke fluent Mandarin after waking from a coma has become a Chinese community
TV sensation.

Even the local media seemed to have picked up the story and assumed that Ben's ability to speak fluent Mandarin
was a result of his coma. Or at least the coma was partly responsible...

Edited by shk00design on 08 January 2014 at 6:35am

1 person has voted this message useful



patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4293 days ago

1546 posts - 3200 votes 
Studies: German

 
 Message 4 of 4
08 January 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
I think this phenomenon is not so uncommon, given that different languages occupy somewhat different areas of the brain.

My mother was born in Lithuania and exposed to Russian for a few years after the annexation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union, and then subsequently fled to Germany as a child in 1942, and then to Australia in 1948.

She told me a few years ago that a fellow-Lithuanian friend of her's had had a stroke and woke up being neither able to speak English nor Lithuanian, but only Russian which she hadn't used for more than sixty years - much to the dismay of her English speaking husband. Luckily her normal language abilities returned after some days; though if her stroke had been more extensive perhaps she would have been stuck with the Russian she learnt as a child.

In one of my language classes in Germany I met a Spanish student studying psycholinguistics. She told me in Barcelona, when they do operations for epilepsy (in which a small amount of brain tissue is removed) that they sometimes have to go near/through a language area, and the patients are asked if they want to keep (or risk losing) Catalan or Spanish. Not an easy decision!

Edited by patrickwilken on 08 January 2014 at 10:31am



1 person has voted this message useful



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