[deleted]
A stroke can definitely affect your speech, so some people may not pronounce their words as they did before. In some cases it might sound to others as if they have a "foreign accent", especially if they can no longer pronounce some sounds like "th" or "r" well, which are also sounds that non-English speakers have trouble with.
As for suddenly being able to speak a language they never knew? No. I have heard of some people becoming more artistic or creative, but that could be from damage to other parts of the brain that previously inhibited that behavior.
Cinner@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Your question is based on a false premise. There is no ‘foreign language syndrome,’ that’s a myth based on the very real foreign accent syndrome which is where after a stroke or some other neurological issue, people start talking as if they’re from a foreign land. When you learn to speak a language, you’ve trained your tongue muscles in a very specific way and it’s hard to do, think of how long some foreign people you know have been living where you live, and they still don’t have perfect English or whatever your native tongue is.
htripm@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Cinner@lemmy.world 9 months ago
First video says he woke up speaking only Spanish, a language he’d never spoken fluently before. They didn’t say he was speaking it fluently then either, only that he couldn’t speak English when he first woke up.
Second: TBD (didn’t watch yet)
Third: TBD (didn’t watch yet)
snooggums@midwest.social 9 months ago
Those are all sensationalist and misleading headlines. They all knew the language prior and were reported by people who did not speak the language as them suddenly being ‘fluent’.
Comment from first one " a language never spoken FLUENTLY before" that means he spoke Spanish before, just not fluently. His brain just tapped into his short term memory and he remembered it well."
Guy in second link taught English in Asia and lived in Sweden for part of his life.
A comment from the 3rd link: "Title should read: Aussie wakes up from a coma with an improved ability to learn Mandarin. " He had already taken ‘basic Chinese’ in school which would be a huge head start.