Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare condition in which a person’s speech is characterised by the sudden emergence of a pronunciation perceived by others to be a foreign accent. Generally, the symptoms emerge after a brain injury, but in some cases no neurological event has occurred and the accent is assumed to be a psychological response to a distressing situation or event.
However, new Australian research challenges the simple dichotomy between both organic and psychogenic explanations. Published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, the study describes a patient who spoke with several different accents over several months following an initial neurological event.
FAS was first described in 1907, when the French neurologist Pierre Marie described a Parisian who developed an Alsatian accent after a stroke. Since then more than 100 cases have been documented, with most arising after cerebrovascular accidents, traumatic brain injuries or other damage to the brain. The accent is often a residual symptom of a more severe speech disorder, and may resolve completely over time.
Studies have suggested that the features of FAS result from disruptions to the prosody of speech – its stress, rhythm and/or intonation – or to the segmenting of phonemes, such as the timing and sequencing of vowels and consonants.
Neuroimaging of FAS patients has often...
