Beware of Foreign Accent Syndrome!

At first I thought it might be another of Gadling’s April Fool’s Day posts, but, oh, it’s real. Too real. Last night I saw on ABC’s Primetime how Foreign Accent Syndrome almost ripped apart at least one Michigan family, making a child cry for a good few seconds, when his mother woke up speaking not with her usual Midwestern accent but with one that made her sound vaguely like a Russian transplant. According to a BBC article from a few years back, it is a real condition.

It’s quite rare, though. From the BBC:

It can follow a stroke—or another kind of head injury, and while the problem often clears up on its own, it can be another highly upsetting blow for patients often struggling with other disabilities.

To add insult to injury, some doctors dismissed the problem as more likely to be psychiatric in origin than physical.

Now researchers at Oxford University have found that patients with “foreign accent syndrome” seem to share certain characteristics which might explain the problem.

A small number of them all had tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain.

This might explain the combination of subtle changes to vocal features such as lengthening of syllables, altered pitch or mispronounced sounds which make a patient’s pronunciation sound similar to a foreign accent.

To see and hear for yourself, ABC has a video clip from the segment on its Web site. Wikipedia also has a page dedicated to the condition.

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