WEBVTT - How Does Foreign Accent Syndrome Work? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.600 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff, 0:00:07.640 --> 0:00:13.400 Lauren volbebam here. Every speaker of every language has an accent, 0:00:13.720 --> 0:00:17.400 even if it's considered neutral. An accent is made up 0:00:17.440 --> 0:00:20.600 of the different sounds and stresses that you use in 0:00:20.640 --> 0:00:23.880 pronouncing words and phrases, and it's flavored by all kinds 0:00:23.920 --> 0:00:27.280 of influences, like what languages you grew up with, how 0:00:27.360 --> 0:00:29.960 your family and neighbors speak, and the voices that you 0:00:30.040 --> 0:00:34.559 hear in media. Many accents are common to specific areas, 0:00:34.680 --> 0:00:39.680 but they're also individual. So imagine waking up with a 0:00:39.720 --> 0:00:43.360 different one than you've ever used, not on purpose, you 0:00:43.600 --> 0:00:48.360 just sound different. It's rare, but it does happen. Today, 0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:54.160 let's talk about foreign accent syndrome. We'll start with a 0:00:54.200 --> 0:00:59.200 true story. Lisa Alemia had an overbite sufficiently pronounced for 0:00:59.240 --> 0:01:02.480 her to require jaw surgery. That kind of operation is 0:01:02.520 --> 0:01:06.880 pretty serious and requires complete sedation. When Alamiya woke up, 0:01:07.040 --> 0:01:09.240 she was hoping it would be her new jawline that 0:01:09.280 --> 0:01:14.400 impressed people. Instead, it was the way she spoke. Before 0:01:14.440 --> 0:01:17.920 Alamiya had the surgery, she possessed a gentle Texas drawl, 0:01:18.160 --> 0:01:21.480 which made sense because she was born raised and continued 0:01:21.480 --> 0:01:25.520 to live in Texas. But after the surgery, Alamiya didn't 0:01:25.520 --> 0:01:30.600 sound Textan at all. She sounded British. Her husband and 0:01:30.680 --> 0:01:33.480 three kids thought she was putting it on, but Alamia 0:01:33.560 --> 0:01:36.800 couldn't seem to shake her new sound. The weird thing 0:01:36.959 --> 0:01:39.560 was that she'd never even been to England, but she 0:01:39.720 --> 0:01:42.000 sounded like she might be about to take tea down 0:01:42.000 --> 0:01:47.640 to Nabbey. Things could have been worse. During World War II. 0:01:47.840 --> 0:01:50.840 For example, a Norwegian woman by the name of Astrid 0:01:50.920 --> 0:01:53.880 suffered a brain injury from shrapnel that exploded during a 0:01:53.880 --> 0:01:57.520 bombing raid. When she recovered and was able to speak again, 0:01:57.800 --> 0:02:01.680 she had inexplicably developed a journ of an accent. This 0:02:01.880 --> 0:02:06.160 was extremely inconvenient Norway was at the time occupied by 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:09.320 the Germans. Anyone who didn't know her well assumed she 0:02:09.440 --> 0:02:13.440 was attached to the occupying enemy force. Shopkeepers refused to 0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:15.919 serve her, and neighbors shunned her, even though she had 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:18.760 never been to Germany and didn't speak a word of German. 0:02:20.919 --> 0:02:23.800 When Astrid saw a neurologist, he referred to her speech 0:02:23.880 --> 0:02:28.760 as disprosoity. A prosody refers to the non grammatical elements 0:02:28.800 --> 0:02:32.840 of speech like tone and rhythm. The condition was renamed 0:02:32.960 --> 0:02:36.480 foreign accent syndrome or FAS by the time Lisa Alma 0:02:36.560 --> 0:02:39.440 reported her problem to her doctor and managed to convince 0:02:39.520 --> 0:02:43.480 him that she wasn't faking it. FAS is an extremely 0:02:43.600 --> 0:02:47.000 rare form of language disorder, so rare in fact, that 0:02:47.000 --> 0:02:49.560 there are only about one hundred known case studies of it. 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:54.640 Foreign accent syndrome isn't the sort of phenomena that occur 0:02:54.800 --> 0:02:58.320 when an American watches too much British TV, or you 0:02:58.360 --> 0:03:00.560 move to a new place and pick up some of 0:03:00.600 --> 0:03:04.000 the sounds in vocabulary from the dialect that you're saturated in. 0:03:04.960 --> 0:03:08.680 With FAS, it's almost as though you've suddenly become someone else, 0:03:09.160 --> 0:03:12.040 and it's not clear whether you'll ever get your old, 0:03:12.080 --> 0:03:17.760 familiar accent back. But such a transformation usually doesn't come 0:03:17.800 --> 0:03:21.480 out of the blue. It's often triggered by some physical event, 0:03:21.800 --> 0:03:24.480 such as head trauma, a stroke, or the onset of 0:03:24.520 --> 0:03:29.160 multiple sclerosis. In these cases, researchers typically find that the 0:03:29.240 --> 0:03:31.680 damage sustained has occurred in the parts of the brain 0:03:31.760 --> 0:03:34.880 related to speech, such as the left hemisphere or in 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:39.040 the middle cerebral artery. The creation of speech is wildly 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:42.880 complex and involves multiple areas of the brain, so damage 0:03:42.880 --> 0:03:46.600 caused to one area can alter speech without impeding it 0:03:47.120 --> 0:03:50.880 that people with FAS are often entirely coherent and articulate, 0:03:51.240 --> 0:03:54.560 although some can have difficulty with speech elements like word order. 0:03:56.640 --> 0:04:00.440 All of the above causes of FAS are neurogenic. They 0:04:00.480 --> 0:04:04.160 arise in the tissue of the nervous system. Until recently, 0:04:04.240 --> 0:04:07.400 it was thought that foreign accent syndrome was entirely neurogenic 0:04:07.440 --> 0:04:11.360 in origin, but it's now known that FAS can be psychogenic, 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:16.600 meaning the root can be a mental health issue. Bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:19.520 and psychological trauma have all been found to correlate with 0:04:19.680 --> 0:04:25.839 rare cases of psychogenic foreign accent syndrome, But sometimes doctors 0:04:25.880 --> 0:04:28.760 are flummixed by the appearance of FAS, as they were 0:04:28.800 --> 0:04:32.640 in the case of Lisa Elmia. Joss surgery doesn't typically 0:04:32.680 --> 0:04:36.679 cause FAS. In fact, there are no other recorded cases 0:04:36.680 --> 0:04:41.880 of this outcome from such a routine operation. Still, the 0:04:41.920 --> 0:04:44.960 sample size for foreign accents syndrome is so small that 0:04:45.040 --> 0:04:47.400 it's hard to establish a set of norms for it. 0:04:48.120 --> 0:04:51.440 There have been Japanese speakers who suddenly began sounding Korean 0:04:51.839 --> 0:04:54.640 a Brits who were mistaken for French people, the Scottish 0:04:54.680 --> 0:04:58.360 people who developed South African accents overnight, and Spaniards who 0:04:58.360 --> 0:05:03.080 seemed to suddenly hail from he hungry. One woman from Plymouth, England, 0:05:03.120 --> 0:05:05.560 went to the emergency room with a severe migraine and 0:05:05.640 --> 0:05:10.040 came out with a Chinese accent. As a white english woman, 0:05:10.160 --> 0:05:14.120 this was hard to explain. Things can get really embarrassing 0:05:14.200 --> 0:05:17.240 for patients with fas, especially if everyone thinks they're faking 0:05:17.279 --> 0:05:24.560 it and at worst being racist. Okay, but whatever the cause, 0:05:24.640 --> 0:05:30.120 physical or mental, how does this happen? For most of us, 0:05:30.240 --> 0:05:33.479 speaking is second nature. We don't even think about how 0:05:33.480 --> 0:05:36.960 complex the process is. But to get words to come 0:05:37.000 --> 0:05:38.960 out of your mouth sounding the way that they need 0:05:39.000 --> 0:05:44.000 to in a given context requires exquisite control of your jaw, tongue, lips, 0:05:44.040 --> 0:05:48.960 and laynxpuscles. If anything messes with this finely calibrated team, 0:05:49.279 --> 0:05:53.000 your speech can end up sounding kind of funny. Think 0:05:53.040 --> 0:05:56.080 about when you have allergies or a cold swelling your 0:05:56.120 --> 0:06:00.240 nose and throat and you sound stuffy or nasally, or 0:06:00.400 --> 0:06:03.000 if you've ever had an anesthetic for a medical procedure 0:06:03.120 --> 0:06:06.400 and started slurring your words from a loss of muscle control. 0:06:07.600 --> 0:06:11.400 Take vowel sounds, for instance, Where we place our tongue 0:06:11.440 --> 0:06:14.600 and how we shape it can result in incredibly subtle 0:06:14.680 --> 0:06:18.480 variations in the way that we pronounce vowels. Shifts and 0:06:18.560 --> 0:06:22.120 vowel sounds are key to different accents. Lose a little 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:24.520 bit of control over your tongue and you could end 0:06:24.600 --> 0:06:28.880 up sounding different. This is at the heart of foreign 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:32.200 accent syndrome. It's not that a person recovers from a 0:06:32.240 --> 0:06:35.320 stroke with a brand new cultural identity. It's that the 0:06:35.360 --> 0:06:38.520 stroke has impaired their control over the fine motor skills 0:06:38.560 --> 0:06:41.840 required to sound the way that they used to, especially 0:06:41.880 --> 0:06:45.640 in their vowels, which in turn leads listeners to assume 0:06:45.760 --> 0:06:51.000 that the person has a foreign accent. Accents lie in 0:06:51.040 --> 0:06:54.120 the ear of the listener. In many cases of FAS, 0:06:54.360 --> 0:06:57.920 different listeners can't agree on where the speaker's new accent 0:06:58.000 --> 0:07:01.760 is from. Some people thought that Astrid, the Swedish patient, 0:07:02.080 --> 0:07:06.480 was French, not German. Researchers actually conducted a study in 0:07:06.520 --> 0:07:08.960 which they asked people to identify the accent of a 0:07:09.000 --> 0:07:12.840 person with FAS, and the answers were quite literally all 0:07:12.880 --> 0:07:16.520 over the map. Hearing the same speech. Some listeners said 0:07:16.520 --> 0:07:21.520 it sounded French, others Italian, others Welsh, others Chinese. So 0:07:22.200 --> 0:07:25.840 foreign accent syndrome is sort of a misnomer. It's really 0:07:25.920 --> 0:07:32.240 just unusual. To diagnose and treat foreign accent syndrome, a 0:07:32.320 --> 0:07:36.080 whole team of specialists may get involved, including neurologists to 0:07:36.160 --> 0:07:40.000 evaluate how the patient's nervous system is functioning, radiologists to 0:07:40.200 --> 0:07:44.400 use imaging technologies to look for signs of damage, neuropsychologists 0:07:44.400 --> 0:07:48.720 to examine links between behavior and brain function, clinical psychologists 0:07:48.760 --> 0:07:52.720 to evaluate stress and other mental issues, and speech language 0:07:52.760 --> 0:07:58.520 pathologists to help assess and reduce disordered speech. The treatment 0:07:58.520 --> 0:08:01.720 of a case of neurogenic fa is a specialized form 0:08:01.760 --> 0:08:05.840 of speech therapy known as accent reduction techniques, that is, 0:08:06.160 --> 0:08:09.600 retraining the larynx, tongue, and lips to articulate the way 0:08:09.600 --> 0:08:14.280 that they once did. The treatment of psychogenic FAS requires 0:08:14.360 --> 0:08:18.120 treatment of the underlying illness. The syndrome often disappears as 0:08:18.120 --> 0:08:22.880 a patient recovers from an event or episode, to make 0:08:22.920 --> 0:08:26.200 matters more complicated, though there is a mixed variant of 0:08:26.320 --> 0:08:29.200 FAS in which the origin of the syndrome is considered 0:08:29.240 --> 0:08:34.960 to be a combination of psychogenic and neurogenic causes. As 0:08:35.080 --> 0:08:39.840 medical understanding and diagnostic tools advance, perhaps the differences between 0:08:39.920 --> 0:08:44.360 psychogenic and neurogenic causation will erode a little bit. Some 0:08:44.440 --> 0:08:47.520 recent studies have found that certain mental illnesses can be 0:08:47.559 --> 0:08:51.080 caused by the immune system's response to infections, the showing 0:08:51.320 --> 0:08:54.800 that at least sometimes the mind body divide is not 0:08:54.880 --> 0:09:02.600 as pronounced as we might think. Today's episode is based 0:09:02.640 --> 0:09:05.080 on the article how foreign accent Syndrome works on how 0:09:05.120 --> 0:09:08.480 stuffworks dot Com, written by Oscene Kuran. Brain Stuff is 0:09:08.520 --> 0:09:11.160 production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com 0:09:11.200 --> 0:09:14.120 and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my 0:09:14.160 --> 0:09:17.640 heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever 0:09:17.640 --> 0:09:19.080 you listen to your favorite shows.