How Does Foreign Accent Syndrome Work?

Patients with Foreign Accent Syndrome seem to develop a whole new accent overnight. Learn how it can happen in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/neurological-conditions/foreign-accent-syndrome.htm

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren volbebam here. Every speaker of every language has an accent,
even if it's considered neutral. An accent is made up
of the different sounds and stresses that you use in
pronouncing words and phrases, and it's flavored by all kinds

(00:23):
of influences, like what languages you grew up with, how
your family and neighbors speak, and the voices that you
hear in media. Many accents are common to specific areas,
but they're also individual. So imagine waking up with a
different one than you've ever used, not on purpose, you
just sound different. It's rare, but it does happen. Today,

(00:48):
let's talk about foreign accent syndrome. We'll start with a
true story. Lisa Alemia had an overbite sufficiently pronounced for
her to require jaw surgery. That kind of operation is
pretty serious and requires complete sedation. When Alamiya woke up,
she was hoping it would be her new jawline that

(01:09):
impressed people. Instead, it was the way she spoke. Before
Alamiya had the surgery, she possessed a gentle Texas drawl,
which made sense because she was born raised and continued
to live in Texas. But after the surgery, Alamiya didn't
sound Textan at all. She sounded British. Her husband and

(01:30):
three kids thought she was putting it on, but Alamia
couldn't seem to shake her new sound. The weird thing
was that she'd never even been to England, but she
sounded like she might be about to take tea down
to Nabbey. Things could have been worse. During World War II.
For example, a Norwegian woman by the name of Astrid

(01:50):
suffered a brain injury from shrapnel that exploded during a
bombing raid. When she recovered and was able to speak again,
she had inexplicably developed a journ of an accent. This
was extremely inconvenient Norway was at the time occupied by
the Germans. Anyone who didn't know her well assumed she
was attached to the occupying enemy force. Shopkeepers refused to

(02:13):
serve her, and neighbors shunned her, even though she had
never been to Germany and didn't speak a word of German.
When Astrid saw a neurologist, he referred to her speech
as disprosoity. A prosody refers to the non grammatical elements
of speech like tone and rhythm. The condition was renamed
foreign accent syndrome or FAS by the time Lisa Alma

(02:36):
reported her problem to her doctor and managed to convince
him that she wasn't faking it. FAS is an extremely
rare form of language disorder, so rare in fact, that
there are only about one hundred known case studies of it.
Foreign accent syndrome isn't the sort of phenomena that occur
when an American watches too much British TV, or you

(02:58):
move to a new place and pick up some of
the sounds in vocabulary from the dialect that you're saturated in.
With FAS, it's almost as though you've suddenly become someone else,
and it's not clear whether you'll ever get your old,
familiar accent back. But such a transformation usually doesn't come
out of the blue. It's often triggered by some physical event,

(03:21):
such as head trauma, a stroke, or the onset of
multiple sclerosis. In these cases, researchers typically find that the
damage sustained has occurred in the parts of the brain
related to speech, such as the left hemisphere or in
the middle cerebral artery. The creation of speech is wildly
complex and involves multiple areas of the brain, so damage

(03:42):
caused to one area can alter speech without impeding it
that people with FAS are often entirely coherent and articulate,
although some can have difficulty with speech elements like word order.
All of the above causes of FAS are neurogenic. They
arise in the tissue of the nervous system. Until recently,

(04:04):
it was thought that foreign accent syndrome was entirely neurogenic
in origin, but it's now known that FAS can be psychogenic,
meaning the root can be a mental health issue. Bipolar disorders, schizophrenia,
and psychological trauma have all been found to correlate with
rare cases of psychogenic foreign accent syndrome, But sometimes doctors

(04:25):
are flummixed by the appearance of FAS, as they were
in the case of Lisa Elmia. Joss surgery doesn't typically
cause FAS. In fact, there are no other recorded cases
of this outcome from such a routine operation. Still, the
sample size for foreign accents syndrome is so small that
it's hard to establish a set of norms for it.

(04:48):
There have been Japanese speakers who suddenly began sounding Korean
a Brits who were mistaken for French people, the Scottish
people who developed South African accents overnight, and Spaniards who
seemed to suddenly hail from he hungry. One woman from Plymouth, England,
went to the emergency room with a severe migraine and
came out with a Chinese accent. As a white english woman,

(05:10):
this was hard to explain. Things can get really embarrassing
for patients with fas, especially if everyone thinks they're faking
it and at worst being racist. Okay, but whatever the cause,
physical or mental, how does this happen? For most of us,

(05:30):
speaking is second nature. We don't even think about how
complex the process is. But to get words to come
out of your mouth sounding the way that they need
to in a given context requires exquisite control of your jaw, tongue, lips,
and laynxpuscles. If anything messes with this finely calibrated team,
your speech can end up sounding kind of funny. Think

(05:53):
about when you have allergies or a cold swelling your
nose and throat and you sound stuffy or nasally, or
if you've ever had an anesthetic for a medical procedure
and started slurring your words from a loss of muscle control.
Take vowel sounds, for instance, Where we place our tongue
and how we shape it can result in incredibly subtle

(06:14):
variations in the way that we pronounce vowels. Shifts and
vowel sounds are key to different accents. Lose a little
bit of control over your tongue and you could end
up sounding different. This is at the heart of foreign
accent syndrome. It's not that a person recovers from a
stroke with a brand new cultural identity. It's that the

(06:35):
stroke has impaired their control over the fine motor skills
required to sound the way that they used to, especially
in their vowels, which in turn leads listeners to assume
that the person has a foreign accent. Accents lie in
the ear of the listener. In many cases of FAS,
different listeners can't agree on where the speaker's new accent

(06:58):
is from. Some people thought that Astrid, the Swedish patient,
was French, not German. Researchers actually conducted a study in
which they asked people to identify the accent of a
person with FAS, and the answers were quite literally all
over the map. Hearing the same speech. Some listeners said
it sounded French, others Italian, others Welsh, others Chinese. So

(07:22):
foreign accent syndrome is sort of a misnomer. It's really
just unusual. To diagnose and treat foreign accent syndrome, a
whole team of specialists may get involved, including neurologists to
evaluate how the patient's nervous system is functioning, radiologists to
use imaging technologies to look for signs of damage, neuropsychologists

(07:44):
to examine links between behavior and brain function, clinical psychologists
to evaluate stress and other mental issues, and speech language
pathologists to help assess and reduce disordered speech. The treatment
of a case of neurogenic fa is a specialized form
of speech therapy known as accent reduction techniques, that is,

(08:06):
retraining the larynx, tongue, and lips to articulate the way
that they once did. The treatment of psychogenic FAS requires
treatment of the underlying illness. The syndrome often disappears as
a patient recovers from an event or episode, to make
matters more complicated, though there is a mixed variant of

(08:26):
FAS in which the origin of the syndrome is considered
to be a combination of psychogenic and neurogenic causes. As
medical understanding and diagnostic tools advance, perhaps the differences between
psychogenic and neurogenic causation will erode a little bit. Some
recent studies have found that certain mental illnesses can be

(08:47):
caused by the immune system's response to infections, the showing
that at least sometimes the mind body divide is not
as pronounced as we might think. Today's episode is based
on the article how foreign accent Syndrome works on how
stuffworks dot Com, written by Oscene Kuran. Brain Stuff is

(09:08):
production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com
and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.