Foreign Accent syndrome baffles medical experts

[Evo]

Yes, but it does make me wonder about the origins of accents in the first place. Could this be related in that different areas of the brain are responsible for the different speech patterns, that later evolved into modern languages and dialects?

When you learn to speak a language you get used to how and where you place your tongue, form your lips, and the emphasis you put on words or syllables, and that "style" carries over when you try to pronounce words in another language, and this is what causes similar sounding "accents". When I was learning Italian, I had to learn to place my tongue in a different place when pronouncing certain letters to remove the American "sound". Same letter, two distinctively different sounds. I remember having to look at the tongue diagrams to help me pronounce the words correctly since my tongue would automatically hit my palate at the right place for the American sound. It was very interesting.

I could see where brain damage could cause you to forget or confuse what you've learned.

 

[jim mcnamara]

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/mente/brain-development.htm

This presents two models for language utilization in the brain, which are age-dependent.
The idea is that different areas in the brain can be used for languages learned later on than for those languages learned at infancy.

The person may have damage in the primary language area and is having to use another secondary area, with less success.

 

[Q_Goest]

This was in the news so I thought I would give the thread a bump.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6241218

In the movie it seemed obvious that all three of the women affected were perfectly cognizant of the fact their voices had changed and that they sounded as if they were speaking with this accent. They could hear themselves speaking, and they could distinguish the fact they were speaking abnormally. Also, it sounded as if they realized the unintelligable words they were speaking weren't 'normal' and in fact the one woman describes it as "she didn't know what they were speaking, or how long it was going to last" My interpretation is that she seemed to know what it was she wanted her mouth to say but it just didn't come out right, something like Evo suggested here:

When you learn to speak a language you get used to how and where you place your tongue, form your lips, and the emphasis you put on words or syllables, and that "style" carries over when you try to pronounce words in another language, and this is what causes similar sounding "accents". When I was learning Italian, I had to learn to place my tongue in a different place when pronouncing certain letters to remove the American "sound". Same letter, two distinctively different sounds. I remember having to look at the tongue diagrams to help me pronounce the words correctly since my tongue would automatically hit my palate at the right place for the American sound. It was very interesting.

I could see where brain damage could cause you to forget or confuse what you've learned.

Why is that interesting? Because the standard paradigm of mind assumes that our mental experiences are an emergent property of the entire brain (or close to it). But in this case, there was no difference with the 'input' (ie: they heard everything fine, didn’t complain about any visual or other experiences) nor with any phenomenal experience as best we can tell. The only variation was with the 'output' (what the mouth and vocal cords were doing).

Can we then conclude that this Broca area has no affect on our phenomenal experience? In other words, the Broca area of the brain is NOT part of the brain that creates this "emergent phenomena" we know as 'experience'.

I think so. And I wonder if there isn’t a list that one could compile that indicated similar areas that had no affect on phenomenal experience.