A recent breaking news story has been floating around the media about a Croatian girl who awakened from a coma with a change in language abilities. Prior to falling comatose, she had been learning German and after 24 hours in a coma, she woke up speaking only in German and not her native tongue Croatian.
Reading another article about this, the initial stories claimed that the 13 year girl woke up speaking fluent German. This however proved to be exaggerated and in fact her level of fluency could not have increased as a result of her coma. Findings did prove the claim that the girl was unable to speak her native language afterwards. This is a condition called bilingual aphasia in which damage to a part of the brain causes a person to lose capabilities with one of their two languages. Such a condition is possible because different regions of the brain are involved in remembering each of the two languages; this girl must have received an injury to the sections of her brain that were used for Croatian and resulted in her ability to only speak German.
This case proved that a lot of information remains undiscovered about language and the role the brain plays in language learning. It is known that different types of memory are involved in learning first and second languages but the point at which someone reaches a level of fluency for it to move from declarative to non-declarative memory remains unknown. Understanding how the brain manages multiples languages is still a relatively new task for cognitive psychologists and neurologists and learning how injuries to certain brain regions could affect the individual remains to be discovered.
I think this brings up the importance of biological factors in relation to language. The brain plays a major role in how we communicate with the world and how we are able to learn new languages. Further research into this topic could help us come up with better methods for learning multiple languages which can be extremely useful for people our globalized world.
The article can be found here: http://news.discovery.com/human/coma-croatian-girl-german.html
No comments:
Post a Comment