Bilingual Aphasia

This is an amazing story that to my bewilderment, apparently happens somewhat often amongst coma patients. A 13-year old Croatian girl woke up from a 24 hours coma speaking not her native Croatian, but German. She has just started studying German in school, and has been watching TV shows and reading books in order to improve, according to various sources. However, according to her parents, she was "by no means fluent." Doctors believe that a swelling of the injured part of her brain has disrupted neural connections, causing her to lack access to the part of her brain where her Croatian language skills are. A positive explanation is still unclear.

Nevertheless, this case provides support for the theory that second language acquisition occurs in separate areas of the brain. A study conducted in 1997 showed the following findings relating to this theory:

"In 1997, Kim et al used the fMRI method to examine cortical activation among a range of bilinguals who were proficient in various languages. The participant pool was divided into two groups, early (L2 acquisition before the age of five) and late (after the age of twelve) bilinguals. The results suggested anatomical variation between early and late bilinguals such that although early bilinguals showed similar activation in both Broca's and Wernicke's areas during a silent sentence generation task while late bilinguals displayed common activation in Wernicke's but not in Broca's area. These results indicate a role for late language acquisition, suggesting that the "critical period" concept cannot be discarded and that to some extent language learning after a certain age is differentially represented in the brain. "

We talked about the debunking of the "critical period" of language acquisition, but there may be some truth to it. It's possible that after a certain age, we don't lose the capability of learning languages, but instead lose an anatomical availability to acquiring a language. Meaning that the increasing difficulty of learning a language is somehow due to the degeneration of brain plasticity.

If indeed it is the case that we harbor language skills in different areas of the brain, it simply serves as further support for learning new languages. A brain injury may inhibit the use of one language, but at the same time increase the fluency of another, as in the case of this 13 year old girl. Indeed, there is much more to study within the realm of neuroscience and language acquisition and maintenance.

References:

Story:

http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978194066

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/7583971/Croatian-teenager-wakes-from-coma-speaking-fluent-German.html

Study:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1902