Foreign Accent Syndrome: Causes And Treatment

How would you like it if you wake up one day and speak your native language but with a foreign accent? If this happened to you, it would be due to what scientists call Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) or pseudo-foreign accent syndrome.

We are talking about a phenomenon described in 1907 by the French neurologist Pierre Marie. He spoke of a case of a Parisian who began speaking with an Alsatian accent after suffering a stroke.

Foreign accent syndrome is a rare neurological speech disorder that has been documented in about twenty specific studies. A person’s speech takes on a sound that sounds different to native listeners.

This is a result of brain injury, mainly subcortical injury. This disorder can lead to a sense of loss of identity. Indeed, the affected patient cannot avoid speaking with a foreign accent and because of its abrupt appearance.

The symptoms last for months or years or disappear spontaneously and gradually. In a smaller number of cases they manifest themselves briefly in patients with psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia and conversion disorder. In addition, many of those affected do not realize that their accent has changed and are surprised when someone points it out to them.

Symptoms of Foreign Accent Syndrome

This syndrome is clinically characterized by the following deficits:

• Segmentally. There is a greater change in vowels than in consonants. Also, the change in the pronunciation time of vowels is shorter in some patients and longer in others. Finally, there are changes and pronunciation errors of the consonants.

• prosodic. This has to do with rhythm and word intonation. Researchers noted that there is a decrease in timing between syllables, insertion of vowels and poor transition between words.

The main problems are:

• Changes in grammatical, articular and prosodic elements without problems in understanding and expressing language, including without phonetic distortions.
• The lack of verbal fluency manifests itself in the same way as in aphasia and apraxia. However, unlike those speech disorders, a person’s verbal output doesn’t appear to be pathological, it just comes across as odd.

There is no evidence of changes in functionality in a person’s daily routine. However, the multiple emotional implication of this disorder involves the manifestation of adverse psychosocial consequences in the life of the affected person. Many studies also describe this.

Causes

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a sudden condition that changes the proper pattern of a native language. It does this in such a way that the affected person, their relatives, and their therapist all perceive an accent.

Strokes and craniocerebral trauma, involving areas related to language production and expression, are among the leading causes, among other pathologies such as multiple sclerosis, brain tumors, and anesthesia.

Foreign accent syndrome can last for months or years or can disappear spontaneously or gradually. However, there are stories of people who needed speech and cognitive therapies.

This is because, over time, this syndrome can have a major psychological impact on those who suffer from it if they do not regain their own speech. Sometimes they may not even remember.

The usual treatments in these cases are therapies and linguistic techniques that allow those affected to restore some or all of their pre-syndrome wording. In addition, speech therapists use accent reduction techniques and teach people to move their lips or jaw in specific ways.

In 2010, scientists from the University of Malaga combined these rehabilitation exercises with donepezil, a drug commonly used to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

This dual treatment produced excellent recovery symptoms in a patient afflicted with the disease. Other techniques include masked auditory feedback, delayed auditory feedback, and frequency change auditory feedback.