Read with interest an article in the newspaper today about a British woman who started to speak with a Chinese accent after suffering from a very bad migraine attack. Apparently, her migraine was so bad that it caused the blood vessels in the brain to expand, leading to symptoms similar to those of a stroke. And the change in speech accent because of brain trauma is called Foreign Accent Syndrome. The paper states that brain damage can vary speech patterns by lengthening syllables, changing pitch and causing the mispronouncing of sounds.
It certainly was something very new to me. I guess it must be rather traumatic for the lady, who, after speaking in a certain tone all her life, now has to adapt to another totally foreign tone. She is apparently undergoing speech language therapy now to help her return to her usual speech rhythms and patterns, but I can only imagine that it would take a period of time. I wonder if she'll need to undergo some form of counselling as well.
Does Foreign Accent Syndrome happen often? Would someone from Asia have a Western accent if something like that happened to them?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about ther pervasiveness of FAS, but it generally emerges as a result of a blow to the head or other head trauma. Of couse it also does not mean that having head trauma = developing FAS. yup, the changes in accent goes both ways, or maybe all ways (depending on the number of different accents we can come up with :p).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification. Must be difficult for the patient to cope then, with stroke symptoms and a change in speech.
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