Foreign accent syndrome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision dated 2007-04-10, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)

More spoken articles

Foreign accent syndrome is a rare medical condition that usually occurs as a rare side effect of severe brain injury, such as a stroke or a head injury . Between 1941 and 2006, there have been fifty recorded cases. ^[1]

[edit] Description

To the untrained ear, those with the syndrome sound as though they speak their native languages with a foreign accent; for example, an American native speaker of English might sound as though they speak with a British accent, or a native British speaker might speak with a New York American accent. However, researchers at Oxford University have found that certain, specific parts of the brain were injured in some foreign-accent syndrome cases, indicating that certain parts of the brain control various linguistic functions, and damage could result in altered pitch or mispronounced syllables, causing the speech patterns to have a different sounding accent.

Another theory is that, unlike a problem like aphasia, the language centers of the brain are entirely uninvolved. Instead, the person has lost the fine motor skills needed to pronounce phonemes with their usual accent. When they try to pronounce them, they find it sounds like they have a different accent. For example, difficulty pronouncing the letter 'r' at the end of words might mean a person drops them at the end of words. This is done with a Boston accent, thus the person seems to speak with a Boston accent when trying to pronounce words ending in 'r'. To maintain a sense of normalcy and flow, someone with the syndrome then augments the accent effect by imitating the rest of the accent. Depending on how important a certain phoneme is to a person's original accent, they might find speaking in a different accent to be much easier and their usual accent very difficult to consistently pronounce after some motor skills have been lost.

[edit] Occurrences

One of the first recorded incidences of FAS was in a Czech study in 1919.^[2] However there had been an earlier reported case in 1907.^{[citation needed]}

A well-known case of foreign accent syndrome occurred in Norway in 1941 after a young woman, Astrid L., suffered a head injury from shrapnel during an air-raid. After apparently recovering from the injury she was left with what sounded like a strong German accent and was shunned by her fellow Norwegians.^[3]

Another well-known case is that of Judi Roberts, also known as Tiffany Noel, who was born and raised in Indiana, USA. In 1999, at the age of 57, she had a stroke. After recovering her voice, she spoke with an accent which resembled an English accent, though she never had been to Britain. ^[4][5]

Another case of foreign accent syndrome occurred to Linda Walker, a 60 year old woman from the Newcastle area. After a stroke, her normal Geordie accent was transformed and has been variously described as resembling a Jamaican, as well as a French Canadian, Italian and a Slovak accent.^[6] She was interviewed by BBC News 24^[7] and appeared on the Richard and Judy show in the UK in July 2006 to speak of her ordeal.

More recently, in the July 2008 issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, researchers from McMaster University published a study where a woman from Windsor, Ontario, after suffering a stroke, began speaking with what some people describe as a Newfoundland accent. ^{[8] [9]}

In 2008, Cindy Lou Romberg of Port Angeles, Washington, who had suffered a brain injury 17 years earlier, developed foreign accent syndrome after a neck adjustment from her chiropractor. A visit to the hospital ruled out a stroke. Afterwards she spoke with a Russian accent and even appeared to make the grammatical mistakes of a Russian speaking English, as if English was not her native language. She was featured on the October 26, 2008 Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery ER" show^[10] and was also featured on the October 31 edition of Inside Edition.

[edit] References

• Dankovičová J, Gurd JM, Marshall JC, MacMahon MKC, Stuart-Smith J, Coleman JS, Slater A. Aspects of non-native pronunciation in a case of altered accent following stroke (foreign accent syndrome). Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 2001;15:195-218.
• Gurd JM, Bessell NJ, Bladon RA, Bamford JM. A case of foreign accent syndrome, with follow-up clinical, neuropsychological and phonetic descriptions. Neuropsychologia 1988;26:237-51. PMID 3399041
• Gurd JM, Coleman JS, Costello A, Marshall JC. Organic or functional? A new case of foreign accent syndrome. Cortex 2001;37:715-8. PMID 11804223 PSHAW

[edit] External links

• "Stroke gives man Italian accent" at BBC Radio 4 Home Truths, 4 November 2005.
• "I woke up with a foreign accent" at ABC News.
• Journal of Neurolinguistics, Volume 19, Issue 5. Special issue on foreign accent syndrome.
• http://www.utdallas.edu/research/FAS" Foreign Accent Syndrome Support Site created by researchers at University of Texas at Dallas.
• http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/livsstil/halsa/article3801579.ab Woman gets swedish accent after kiropractors visit.

[edit] See also

• Susac's syndrome