'My Words Are Like an Uncontrollable Dog': On Life with Nonfluent Aphasia (2025)

I had a weird experience with thankfully very temporary aphasia 20 years ago, which I wrote a bit about here: https://dmd.3e.org/2005-11-23-aphasia-and-back-sunday-20-nov...

A note to writers, when a stroke or other brain injury victim relearns speech the worst comparison you can make is "speaking french" or "like Steffi Graf" because it's not an acquired foreign accent syndrome, it's a brain injury.

It's a speech impairment. They're relearning how to form words. Just because one culture forms a rhotic R one way and another culture forms it another way or even deprecates it doesn't make you speak in their accent.

Myabe a bit pedantic but I've always disliked this "my husband spoke French after his stroke" thing.

I admit .. "like Steffi Graff" signals how it sounds, at least to somebody. My friends with stroke speech impairment spoke like they'd had dental local anaesthetic, or were talking through a mouthful of marbles. It's as if they had lost control of some of the finer grained muscles related to speech and had the gross motor skills for the breath, the vocal cords, and the jaw only.

I witnessed somebody go through a temporary form of this after brain surgery. They could converse relatively normally except were completely unable to make decisions.

They would talk about the bird songs from outside but being asked if they wanted a coffee would freeze. Thankfully they made a full recovery after a few months.

https://www.stroke.org/en/fast-experience

There is something similar that I experienced by learning a second language through exposure and not doing much precision based practice. Having words that you can understand when you hear but can’t use yourself is one thing, but when you start speaking words (that are actually correct to what you want to say) that you don’t understand when hearing yourself it’s quite disorientating.

This was a disturbing read, it felt like 1/3rd was documenting continued symptoms that really affected her life and ability to think clearly or substantively, without saying it explicitly.

(2025)