A Canadian Foreign Accent Syndrome case

The Vancouver Sun carries a story about a rare and curious condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) which afflicts a tiny proportion of stroke victims and people receiving head injuries.

Two years ago Rosemay Dore had a stroke. Mercifuly she regained the ability to speak after long and frustrating therapy, but the brain damage left the Windsor, Ont. woman with a Newfoundland accent although she has never been anywhere near Atlantic Canada and has no family connections with the area. Dore is the first person in Canada known to have had this odd accent change, called Foreign Accent Syndrome, after a stroke. She's one of only about 60 reported cases in the world.

"Speech planning is an incredibly complicated thing," based on the many connections between different pieces of the brain that psychologists call the "speech motor circuit," explains Karin Humphreys, a psychologist at McMaster University. "And if you disrupt just one tiny portion of that circuit, it's going to change the way you speak... It's a little like the complex brain work that goes into playing the piano, with precise movements of muscles and exact timing needed in both. But with speech, "we're all virtuosos after all the practice we've done," she said.

That's unless damage disrupts the speech planning. Suddenly, the signals from brain to mouth are a little off, and the tongue won't quite move the way we intend it to.The effect is still English, but with vowels and consonants both twisted a little.

Rosemary said "It's not as bad as it was. But when it first happened my kids were laughing at me. I said, 'What do you find so funny?' And they say my voice, that it was, like, not from here. Still today they think it's cute. I don't know why, but ...For a long time I didn't want to talk" because people kept commenting on her changed accent, she said.

Curiously, most patients who recover with an accent sound entirely foreign - completely French or German, for instance. This appears to be a rare case of still sounding entirely English, but with a different regional accent. "We know a lot more than we knew 20 years ago. But there's still a huge amount to learn." Said Karin Humphreys And most of what the learning comes from cases where there's been damage to some part of the brain, which illustrates what that area did until it was hurt.

In FAS the sufferer does not imitate another accent but the damage to parts of the brain that controls language results in changes in pitch and intonation. It is the listener who perceives these changes as a different accent. This had disastrous consequences for one Norwegian victim, Astrid L, who received a head injury during an air raid in 1941. After recovering Astrid started to speak in what sounded like a German accent and she was ostracised by her fellow countrymen.