A 50 year old man a Padova Yes is awakened from coma after a brain injury from a stroke he started talking to a Slavic accent. In the medical clinic it is not a new but certainly very rare case, it is called “foreign accent syndrome”.
Throughout the medical literature on the subject, from 1800 to today, out of 115 cases there are 112 patients with lesions in the left cerebral hemisphere with the onset of foreign accent syndrome upon awakening, only 3 people affected by stroke in the right cerebral hemisphere always with foreign accent syndrome upon awakening.
The man had been hit by a stroke three years ago and his case was investigated by the team led by Konstantinos Priftis of the Department of General Psychology of the University of Padua. In recent years it has been studied and the first episode in Italy. “Unlike all the cases reported in the literature for the past 220 years, the Italian patient with right hemispheric lesion and foreign accent upon awakening syndrome has been thoroughly studied for three years through a complex longitudinal analysis, say Konstantinos Priftis and Lorella Algiers.
The patient, completely cured from a clinical point of view, upon awakening had an accent and cadence of Slavic origin although he did not have never stayed in countries with phonetic characteristics of this geographical area and did not have lasting contact with people from those regions.
What makes this episode extraordinary is due to the fact that the cortical area located in the left frontal lobe is the crucial one for the production of language, while the patient was affected by stroke in the right part.
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