why do people with amnesia not forget their primary language?
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It’s fascinating how specialized the different parts of the brain are. Even what we might consider a single skill may actually be several separate abilities that are stored in different areas of the brain.
For example, years ago I worked at a teletype service(TTY) that helped people with communication disabilities make phone calls. One day I got a call from someone who wanted to call a friend who had lost her speaking due to a stroke. Since the vast majority of my calls were from/for the deaf and hard of hearing, I wasnt used to calls for the speech-disabled, so I initially set the call up incorrectly.
We were supposed to hear the woman who could speak. She would talk directly to her friend. The friend was then supposed to type her response on her TTY machine; her message would appear on my computer screen and I would read it out loud for her friend, and so on.
However, I inadvertently reversed the set up, so that we could hear the speech impaired woman and so I was able to hear how badly the stroke had devastated her speaking ability. She couldn’t form any words at all. ..”The only sounds out her mouth were “ahhhh…ahhh”
The point is that one would have thought the stroke had destroyed all her language skills, But after trying again, I was able to set the call up correctly and it turned out that she could write brilliantly. Although she’d lost all her verbal skills, her ability to recall and write words and phrases and apparently not been affected at all.
I learned that day that language and speech are not only different, but that damage to a certain part of the brain can potentially destroy one without even touching the other.
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