Bilingual Aphasia: An Interesting Phenomenon

Can you imagine forgetting your native language - the language that you have been speaking since you were a baby? To me, losing the ability to speak in my own native language seems impossible. I may forget English, French, but not Turkish.

An article that I have read, however, makes me consider this notion again. A Croatian girl, whose native language is Croatian, recently had an accident. She has been learning German in school, but she was not fluent in the language yet. When she woke up from coma after the accident, she started speaking German fluently, but at the same time she lost her ability to speak in her native language, Croatian.

How can she forget her first language, but not the second one? Actually, the answer to this question sheds some light on the discussion we had in class about children being more able to learn new languages than adults are. Different parts of the human brain are responsible for learning different languages. When children learn their first language, the realm of the brain that is responsible is called procedural memory. Procedural memory controls actions that we do without thinking, or rather, unconsciously. For a young child, learning a language is like jumping and walking, as the article points out. They learn the language even without realizing that they are learning it. On the other hand, when we learn a second language later in our lives, a different realm of our brains, called declarative memory, is responsible. And it is quite different than procedural memory as it memorizes and studies facts rather than holding onto them without us realizing. I think this may be another good explanation as to why children are better at learning languages than adults are.

Since different regions of brain are responsible for learning different languages, it makes sense that the Croatian girl lost her native language but not her second language. It may be that her procedural memory got damaged while her declarative memory did not.

Researchers and cognitive scientists expressed their skepticism about her ability to speak fluent German after the accident. If she was not fluent in the language before, it is not possible for her to gain fluency after the accident, they say - the best thing she could do is to retain the level of language she already knows. To me, gaining fluency in German after the accident also sounds impossible, but it may not be so. I wonder if she can speak German fluently after losing her ability to speak Croatian. Now that she forgot how to speak her native language, her memory might have gained the ability and space to hold German more than it did before when she knew two languages. Can this be possible?



Link to article: http://news.discovery.com/human/coma-croatian-girl-german.html

Link to chart: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=neurosci&part=A2219&rendertype=figure&id=A2219