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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8693
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Is the point of the story to realistically discuss how this person became mute, in some clinical sense, or to spin a story around the initial premise that he is mute?

If the story is intended to be a discussion of medical or psychological realities, than this is the wrong place to ask. You should be asking this on a medical web site, or studying books on the brain and language development.

But if the point of your story is just to explore what happens to this character after he becomes mute, how it affects his life or whatever, than I wouldn't worry too much about how realistic it is. Just through in a couple of lines about how the psychological trauma caused him to become mute or how that section of his brain atrophied from disuse or whatever. If it's important for your story for X to happen, then just make up some maybe-plausible-sounding explanation and do it.

Writers do this all the time. As premises for a story go, this would be far from the most implausible thing that a writer has ever tried to pull. I sincerely doubt that it is possible to travel in time and there's lot of good physics that says it's impossible to travel faster than light, but characters in science fiction do these things all the time and my technical doubts do nothing to diminish the entertainment value of the story. I find it implausible that Perry Mason only gets murder cases with innocent clients and that the person who really did it always breaks down and confesses in court. I don't believe that the thin and sexy little girls on Charlie's Angels can really beat up not just any man in the house, but every man in the house simultaneously: Women I've met who were tough enough to beat up any man in sight also tended to look tougher than any man in sight. Etc. If the story is entertaining, readers will accept an implausible premise to get it rolling.

Original score: 2