Tag: foreign-accent syndrome

Foreign Accent Syndrome

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“Foreign Accent Syndrome” (FAS) is a rare disorder in which patients start to speak with a foreign or regional tone. This striking condition is often associated with brain damage, such as stroke. Presumably, the lesion affects the neural pathways by which the brain controls the tongue and vocal cords, thus producing a strange sounding speech.

Yet there may be more to FAS than meets the eye (or ear). According to a new paper in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, many or even most cases of FAS are ‘functional’, meaning that the cause of the symptoms lies in psychological processes rather than a brain lesion.

To reach this conclusion, authors Laura McWhirter and colleagues recruited 49 self-described FAS suffers from two online communities to participate in a study. All were English-speaking. The most common reported foreign accents were Italian (12 cases), Eastern European (11), French (8) and German (7), but more obscure accents were also reported including Dutch, Nigerian, and Croatian.

Participants submitted a recording of their voice for assessment by speech experts, as well as answering questions about their symptoms, other health conditions, and personal situation. McWhirter et al. classified 35 of the 49 patients (71%) as having ‘probably functional’ FAS, while only 10/49 (20%) were said to probably have a neurological basis, with the rest unclear.

These classifications are somewhat subjective in that there are no hard-and-fast criteria for functional FAS. None of the ‘functional’ cases reported hard evidence of neurological damage from a brain scan, but only 50% of the ‘neurological’ cases did report such evidence. The presence of other ‘functional’ symptoms such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) was higher in the ‘functional’ group.

In terms of the characteristics of the foreign accents, patients with a presumed functional origin often presented with speech patterns that showed inconsistency or variability. For instance, pronouncing ‘cookie jar’ as ‘tutty dar’ but being able to correctly produce ‘j’, /k/, /g/ and ‘sh’ sounds as part of other words.

But if FAS is often a psychological disorder, what is the psychology behind it? McWhirtner et al. don’t get into this, but it is interesting to note that FAS is often a media-friendly condition. In recent years there have been many news stories dedicated to individual FAS cases. To take just three:

American beauty queen with Foreign Accent Syndrome sounds IRISH, AUSTRALIAN and BRITISH
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/you-sound-like-spice-girl-11993052

Scouse mum regains speech after stroke – but is shocked when her accent turns Russian
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/scouse-mum-regains-speech-after-15931862

Traumatic car accident victim has Irish accent after suffering severe brain injury
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/brain-injury-foreign-accent-syndrome

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2019/03/09/curious-foreign-accent-syndrome/#.XI58R6BKiUn

Boy wakes up from coma speaking an entirely different language

On By A.P.In brainLeave a comment

By Cari Romm

You may have heard of foreign-accent syndrome, a rare and mysterious condition in which someone suffers a brain injury and suddenly — true to the name — begins speaking in a new accent. Last year, for example, a woman from Ontario began speaking in the regional accent of the Canadian East Coast after a stroke, despite the fact that she’d never visited or met anyone from that particular part of the country. Just a few months ago, a woman in Texas developed a British accent following dental surgery.

Both women are members of a pretty exclusive club: Scientists estimate that foreign-accent syndrome strikes just one person in the world each year. And as Time reported earlier this week, a Georgia high-school student has taken the step further: Sixteen-year-old Rueben Nsemoh, recently woke up from a coma speaking fluent Spanish.

The patient: Last month, Nsemoh developed a severe concussion during a soccer game, when another player accidentally kicked him in the head. When he woke up after three days in a coma, according to Time, he’d lost his English, but he could still speak: His first words were “tengo hambre,” Spanish for “I’m hungry” — and his family quickly discovered that he could now speak the language fluently, despite the fact that he had previously known only a handful of Spanish words.

The diagnosis: This isn’t the first time a patient has walked away from a head injury with a newfound linguistic ability: In 2014, an Australian man came to and discovered that he now spoke fluent Mandarin; in 2010, the same thing happened to a Croatian teen with German and a British man with French.

But these cases, like Nsemoh’s, can’t simply be explained as an extension of foreign-accent syndrome, which researchers believe isn’t really the development of a new accent at all: It’s a sign of damage to the area of the brain that controls the motor functions of speech. Any resemblance to a real foreign accent, then, is coincidental — the new speech pattern is just a new way of forcing words out of the mouth, affecting their sounds in random ways.

Seemingly absorbing an entire language overnight, on the other hand, has little to do with motor skills and everything to do with linguistic knowledge. While Nsemoh’s family hasn’t yet received an explanation for his newfound grasp of Spanish, Time noted that he’s heard the language in the past, from his brother (who studied abroad in Spain) and his classmates, meaning it’s not entirely new. For now, that remains just a clue, though the teen’s doctors may not have much longer to solve the case — for the past few weeks, their patient has been slowly regaining his English and losing his Spanish. This one, it seems, may remain un misterio for the ages.