Voices

Last year, William McCartney-Moore, age 9, was rushed to the hospital in York, England, following a seizure and, after surgery, was mute for several weeks, until he finally spoke, not in his strong "Yorkshire" accent but in "the Queen's English" as his mother described it. The outcome was similar for Czech race-car driver Matej Kus, 18, who was knocked out cold in a UK speedway accident in September, only to awaken speaking not in his habitually broken English, but with flawless diction. His new "dialect" lasted only a few days, and Kus says that he remembers none of it.