Interesting read!

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.