regaining speech after a stroke

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

When my FIL had a stroke that hit his speech, he was living out in the woods a long way from a hospital or the family doctors. So he stayed home. My MIL's name was Jackie. His first word (said within 2 days) was "Jack." So I would expect her to say an abbreviated form of someone close to her. Or if someone is helping her, maybe "Thank."

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

May depend how they lost their speech. In some cases, they lost control of their mouth, and that seems to be the scenario you're envisioning. However, some people forget the words altogether. They know they are hungry, but the reason they don't say "I'm hungry" is because they've lost the word that communicates that feeling, rather than not being able to pronounce the word.

Those words can come back on their own (although its much more likely with speech therapy), and there's nothing really ruling what ends up coming back. Mom's speech therapist asked her what she had for dinner, and she said "pizza." He then asked what was on the pizza, and she said "penguin." (the correct answer was pineapple.) Mom even knew she had the wrong word after she said it, but she couldn't find the right one.

Between my experience watching the progression of a family member who had a stroke, coupled with my experience as a physical therapist working with post stroke patients, I would say that it depends. It depends on the side of the brain that was impacted, it depends on the structures that were impacted, and it depends on how long the lady went without talking.
It is my understanding that the difficulty with speech has to do with difficulty with finding the right word and/or difficulty with control/weakness/immobility of the muscles that allow you to formulate the words. My family member experienced a very debilitating stroke, but never really lost speech, just had a negligible slur for a while.

A suggestion that you could use as a quick cheat, especially if you decide it is a control/weakness/immobility issue would be to:
1st pinch half of your lips together....if her stroke was on the left side of the brain pinch the right half of both lips...or vice versa,
then at the same time, try and say "spring" without moving your tongue.
If you decide that her difficulty is with finding the right words, then say anything you want, with or without the pinch and immobile tongue.

I'm sure that there is a video of someone somewhere on the internet, documenting their progress with speech therapy, so that may also be something that you could look into.

I hope that this information helps.

How someone is affected by a stroke is very individual because it depends on which bit of the brain the stroke hit. There are different parts of the brain involved in speech/language which result in some quite distinctive speech/language disabilities. It's probably worth looking this up from neurobiology sources and maybe looking at some actual case studies. You don't need to go into this amount of detail in your book but it would give you some background knowledge to be confident that your character's symptoms and recovery are realistic. Knowing about some case studies would give you an example to follow. You don't need to go into any detail of what part of her brain was damaged by the stroke or anything like that.

I wish I could give a more definitive answer, but I know how complex a subject this is. I did a few modules of it at university and the lecturer who taught the modules was involved in research into brain injury (including strokes), so I got a good insight into it, but there's no simple answer as it's far too complex. I also don't think readers will say "we'll that's not true because my relative had a stroke and her recovery was different" because they'd know that recovery etc varies a lot depending on the individual and which part of the brain was affected.

Bits of the nervous system can't regrow and in recovery from stroke and other damage to the brain/central nervous system (CNS) the recovering comes from creating new neural pathways. The human CNS is very plastic (able to rewire itself) however the older you are the less plastic it becomes, so recovery for an older person would be slower and less complete than in a younger person. However, some recovery would still be possible and probably more likely if before the stroke she was physically and mentally active (this helps to maintain plasticity).