Question: There was an english woman who had something wrong with her brain so she had an operation on it and when she woke up she could speak chinese. How is this possible?

Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

Hi boomits!

I’m not sure that what you’re asking about is Foreign Accent Syndrome, actually – sorry, Rachael! You say that this lady woke up actually being able to speak Chinese. I’ve heard of that, in very rare cases, with other languages (German was the one I’d heard), and it seems to happen when people have heard the language at some point in their past but then forgotten it (like maybe they had lessons at school, but thought they had forgotten all that when they left – they hadn’t forgotten; it had just gone into some deep part of their brain that they couldn’t consciously get to). So, as far as these people are concerned, they don’t speak Chinese, or German, or whatever, until they have this brain surgery and suddenly they do, because the surgery has affected the part of the brain where that deep memory was stored.

What Rachael was talking about, Foreign Accent Syndrome, is another thing, where people wake up still speaking English, but with a Chinese (or whatever) accent. Scientists are still learning about this too, but it seems as if the accent that these people get is not quite the same as the accent of a real Chinese person speaking English – it is only similar in some ways, but similar enough that people think it’s a French accent or whatever. It’s been suggested that it might happen because the part of the brain responsible for planning how you move your jaw and throat when you speak has become disconnected from the part that plans movements in general. The speaker with FAS therefore suddenly can’t “remember” how to make the movements that produce their normal accent, and they start to make another set of movements instead. Those new movements will still produce speech, but not with the same accent that they used to have.

I hope that’s a bit clearer! This is such a new area of research that I have done a bit of Googling on it, and found some research published this year, where they’re still not sure what’s going on, and only “suggesting” “possible” causes for this within the brain.