| I'm not Frrrench. I zhas speek wiz deez OUTRRRRAGEOUS Frrrench aksahnt. |
[Nov. 25th, 2003|01:23 pm] |
(Not a feature about Monty Python.)
Through a different forum, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jasonlizard has brought my attention to a BBC News feature about a recent case of Foreign Accent Syndrome documented in a woman from Indiana who began to speak like she was from England, a country she had never visited, after suffering a stroke in her late fifties:
Mrs. Roberts discovered she had a British accent after recovering her voice following a stroke in 1999.
"When people first started asking me where in England I was from and a family member asked why am I talking that way, that is when I became very conscious that a part of me had died during the stroke," she said. Four years on, she still struggles to convince people that she is a born and bred American.
"People in America accuse me of lying when I say I was born in Indiana. "They would say 'What are you saying that for? Where in England are you from?' "I would insist that I am not."
The same site has a link to a story about a similar case, this time documented on an English patient who developed a French accent (poor thing!) under similar circumstances:
A woman who suffered a minor stroke now cannot stop speaking in a French accent. Wendy Hasnip, who does not speak French and has only been to the country once for a weekend trip to Paris, has been left with a Gallic accent. Mrs Hasnip, 47, of Sevenoaks, Kent, previously had a Yorkshire accent before the stroke at the beginning of November.
Foreign Accent Syndrome appears to be an extremely rare condition, and only a handful of cases have been documented. This, of course, makes it a likely candidate for being listed as one of those misterious and uncanny things of the mind, particularly within the non-scientific press or literature. Perhaps there's more than meets the ear, but this non-neurologist is not particularly overwhelmed by the rarity of the event. As the articles suggest, the changes that give rise to the perception of a foreign accent involve patterns of segmental or syllable lengthening, pitch modifications and other speech modulations induced by minor damage to a patient's particular areas of the brain after a stroke. That a stroke can affect speech patterns is of course not new, so the novelty, and the mystery, lies in the particular way in which it is affected. It seems to me no mystery, however, but simply a matter of stochastic realization, that in some exceedingly rare cases the stars will be aligned in such a way that the changes imposed on someone's normal patterns of lengthening, stressing, intonation, phonation and overall spectral distribution will be just so that the outcome will make the patient sound more like a non-native speaker trying to produce the patient's native language. Most of the time, of course, they will just sound like they have a speech impediment (or perhaps exhibit no significant change whatsoever). And I stress sound because I bet anything that this is primarily (or merely) acoustic similarity, and that if we were to compare the manner of production of the patterns in question between an affected native patient and a non-affected non-native speaker, we might find vast differences. So to recap, if you are really unlucky, you will get a stroke and inherit a speech impediment, but maybe if you are lucky enough, you will get a stroke and start sounding like a Canadian.
By the way, this site offers a high-level explanation of Foreign Accent Syndrome and offers two links to sound clips (.wav files of 1.3 and 1.1MB respectively) of a patient's speech before and after acquiring the syndrome. Though I clearly hear a difference, I can't come up with a ready descriptor to characterize her accent after the stroke. Perhaps some of the readers (listeners) can hazard a guess? |
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