Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren volbebam here. Every speaker of every language has an accent,
Speaker 1: even if it's considered neutral. An accent is made up
Speaker 1: of the different sounds and stresses that you use in
Speaker 1: pronouncing words and phrases, and it's flavored by all kinds
Speaker 1: of influences, like what languages you grew up with, how
Speaker 1: your family and neighbors speak, and the voices that you
Speaker 1: hear in media. Many accents are common to specific areas,
Speaker 1: but they're also individual. So imagine waking up with a
Speaker 1: different one than you've ever used, not on purpose, you
Speaker 1: just sound different. It's rare, but it does happen. Today,
Speaker 1: let's talk about foreign accent syndrome. We'll start with a
Speaker 1: true story. Lisa Alemia had an overbite sufficiently pronounced for
Speaker 1: her to require jaw surgery. That kind of operation is
Speaker 1: pretty serious and requires complete sedation. When Alamiya woke up,
Speaker 1: she was hoping it would be her new jawline that
Speaker 1: impressed people. Instead, it was the way she spoke. Before
Speaker 1: Alamiya had the surgery, she possessed a gentle Texas drawl,
Speaker 1: which made sense because she was born raised and continued
Speaker 1: to live in Texas. But after the surgery, Alamiya didn't
Speaker 1: sound Textan at all. She sounded British. Her husband and
Speaker 1: three kids thought she was putting it on, but Alamia
Speaker 1: couldn't seem to shake her new sound. The weird thing
Speaker 1: was that she'd never even been to England, but she
Speaker 1: sounded like she might be about to take tea down
Speaker 1: to Nabbey. Things could have been worse. During World War II.
Speaker 1: For example, a Norwegian woman by the name of Astrid
Speaker 1: suffered a brain injury from shrapnel that exploded during a
Speaker 1: bombing raid. When she recovered and was able to speak again,
Speaker 1: she had inexplicably developed a journ of an accent. This
Speaker 1: was extremely inconvenient Norway was at the time occupied by
Speaker 1: the Germans. Anyone who didn't know her well assumed she
Speaker 1: was attached to the occupying enemy force. Shopkeepers refused to
Speaker 1: serve her, and neighbors shunned her, even though she had
Speaker 1: never been to Germany and didn't speak a word of German.
Speaker 1: When Astrid saw a neurologist, he referred to her speech
Speaker 1: as disprosoity. A prosody refers to the non grammatical elements
Speaker 1: of speech like tone and rhythm. The condition was renamed
Speaker 1: foreign accent syndrome or FAS by the time Lisa Alma
Speaker 1: reported her problem to her doctor and managed to convince
Speaker 1: him that she wasn't faking it. FAS is an extremely
Speaker 1: rare form of language disorder, so rare in fact, that
Speaker 1: there are only about one hundred known case studies of it.
Speaker 1: Foreign accent syndrome isn't the sort of phenomena that occur
Speaker 1: when an American watches too much British TV, or you
Speaker 1: move to a new place and pick up some of
Speaker 1: the sounds in vocabulary from the dialect that you're saturated in.
Speaker 1: With FAS, it's almost as though you've suddenly become someone else,
Speaker 1: and it's not clear whether you'll ever get your old,
Speaker 1: familiar accent back. But such a transformation usually doesn't come
Speaker 1: out of the blue. It's often triggered by some physical event,
Speaker 1: such as head trauma, a stroke, or the onset of
Speaker 1: multiple sclerosis. In these cases, researchers typically find that the
Speaker 1: damage sustained has occurred in the parts of the brain
Speaker 1: related to speech, such as the left hemisphere or in
Speaker 1: the middle cerebral artery. The creation of speech is wildly
Speaker 1: complex and involves multiple areas of the brain, so damage
Speaker 1: caused to one area can alter speech without impeding it
Speaker 1: that people with FAS are often entirely coherent and articulate,
Speaker 1: although some can have difficulty with speech elements like word order.
Speaker 1: All of the above causes of FAS are neurogenic. They
Speaker 1: arise in the tissue of the nervous system. Until recently,
Speaker 1: it was thought that foreign accent syndrome was entirely neurogenic
Speaker 1: in origin, but it's now known that FAS can be psychogenic,
Speaker 1: meaning the root can be a mental health issue. Bipolar disorders, schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: and psychological trauma have all been found to correlate with
Speaker 1: rare cases of psychogenic foreign accent syndrome, But sometimes doctors
Speaker 1: are flummixed by the appearance of FAS, as they were
Speaker 1: in the case of Lisa Elmia. Joss surgery doesn't typically
Speaker 1: cause FAS. In fact, there are no other recorded cases
Speaker 1: of this outcome from such a routine operation. Still, the
Speaker 1: sample size for foreign accents syndrome is so small that
Speaker 1: it's hard to establish a set of norms for it.
Speaker 1: There have been Japanese speakers who suddenly began sounding Korean
Speaker 1: a Brits who were mistaken for French people, the Scottish
Speaker 1: people who developed South African accents overnight, and Spaniards who
Speaker 1: seemed to suddenly hail from he hungry. One woman from Plymouth, England,
Speaker 1: went to the emergency room with a severe migraine and
Speaker 1: came out with a Chinese accent. As a white english woman,
Speaker 1: this was hard to explain. Things can get really embarrassing
Speaker 1: for patients with fas, especially if everyone thinks they're faking
Speaker 1: it and at worst being racist. Okay, but whatever the cause,
Speaker 1: physical or mental, how does this happen? For most of us,
Speaker 1: speaking is second nature. We don't even think about how
Speaker 1: complex the process is. But to get words to come
Speaker 1: out of your mouth sounding the way that they need
Speaker 1: to in a given context requires exquisite control of your jaw, tongue, lips,
Speaker 1: and laynxpuscles. If anything messes with this finely calibrated team,
Speaker 1: your speech can end up sounding kind of funny. Think
Speaker 1: about when you have allergies or a cold swelling your
Speaker 1: nose and throat and you sound stuffy or nasally, or
Speaker 1: if you've ever had an anesthetic for a medical procedure
Speaker 1: and started slurring your words from a loss of muscle control.
Speaker 1: Take vowel sounds, for instance, Where we place our tongue
Speaker 1: and how we shape it can result in incredibly subtle
Speaker 1: variations in the way that we pronounce vowels. Shifts and
Speaker 1: vowel sounds are key to different accents. Lose a little
Speaker 1: bit of control over your tongue and you could end
Speaker 1: up sounding different. This is at the heart of foreign
Speaker 1: accent syndrome. It's not that a person recovers from a
Speaker 1: stroke with a brand new cultural identity. It's that the
Speaker 1: stroke has impaired their control over the fine motor skills
Speaker 1: required to sound the way that they used to, especially
Speaker 1: in their vowels, which in turn leads listeners to assume
Speaker 1: that the person has a foreign accent. Accents lie in
Speaker 1: the ear of the listener. In many cases of FAS,
Speaker 1: different listeners can't agree on where the speaker's new accent
Speaker 1: is from. Some people thought that Astrid, the Swedish patient,
Speaker 1: was French, not German. Researchers actually conducted a study in
Speaker 1: which they asked people to identify the accent of a
Speaker 1: person with FAS, and the answers were quite literally all
Speaker 1: over the map. Hearing the same speech. Some listeners said
Speaker 1: it sounded French, others Italian, others Welsh, others Chinese. So
Speaker 1: foreign accent syndrome is sort of a misnomer. It's really
Speaker 1: just unusual. To diagnose and treat foreign accent syndrome, a
Speaker 1: whole team of specialists may get involved, including neurologists to
Speaker 1: evaluate how the patient's nervous system is functioning, radiologists to
Speaker 1: use imaging technologies to look for signs of damage, neuropsychologists
Speaker 1: to examine links between behavior and brain function, clinical psychologists
Speaker 1: to evaluate stress and other mental issues, and speech language
Speaker 1: pathologists to help assess and reduce disordered speech. The treatment
Speaker 1: of a case of neurogenic fa is a specialized form
Speaker 1: of speech therapy known as accent reduction techniques, that is,
Speaker 1: retraining the larynx, tongue, and lips to articulate the way
Speaker 1: that they once did. The treatment of psychogenic FAS requires
Speaker 1: treatment of the underlying illness. The syndrome often disappears as
Speaker 1: a patient recovers from an event or episode, to make
Speaker 1: matters more complicated, though there is a mixed variant of
Speaker 1: FAS in which the origin of the syndrome is considered
Speaker 1: to be a combination of psychogenic and neurogenic causes. As
Speaker 1: medical understanding and diagnostic tools advance, perhaps the differences between
Speaker 1: psychogenic and neurogenic causation will erode a little bit. Some
Speaker 1: recent studies have found that certain mental illnesses can be
Speaker 1: caused by the immune system's response to infections, the showing
Speaker 1: that at least sometimes the mind body divide is not
Speaker 1: as pronounced as we might think. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article how foreign accent Syndrome works on how
Speaker 1: stuffworks dot Com, written by Oscene Kuran. Brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com
Speaker 1: and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.