Foreign Accent Syndrome
This is whereby someone is speaking his language but with another language accent and not of his language’s accent. It is not widely known since few cases have been reported.
Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare medical condition with only 50 cases having been reported from 1941 to 2006.
Most of the people do not know it exists due to the fact that few people have been diagnosed with the syndrome.
Research has shown that the cause of FAS is as a result of traumatic brain injury – severe brain injury – sytroke or aneurism.
People who have Foreign Accent Syndrome speak as though they are speaking their own language with a foreign accent. For example, if an American were injured and suffered with this medical condition, they could be sounding as if they were from Germany or England with their verbal accent or other accents, depending on how their brain is affected.
Certain parts of their brain control linguistic functions, and damage can result in altered pitch or mispronounced syllables causing the speech patterns to have a different sounding accent, other than their native tongue.
Another theory shared by those who study this condition, language centers (unlike Aphasis) of the brain are totally uninvolved, and the person has lost the fine mottor skills needed to pronounce words with their usual accent. Some of the letters they normally would speak, some of the letters could be dropped or not to be sounded out. Like the letter ‘r’ or ‘w’ for example, means they drop them at the end of the word with their accent when having this condition. Since some motor skills were lost, they find speaking their own language’s accent difficult.
Patients who have been diagnosed with FAS have often been misunderstod by people including their families and relative around them as trying to imitate or adapt an another foreign language. Therefore, there is a need for people to understand that a medical problem like FAS does exist.
The first case of FAS was recorded in 1919 by CZech study, yet they also has a case in 1907. A very well known case was reported in Norway in 1914 by a woman (Astrid L.) who was hit on the head by a shrapnel causing head injury during an air raid. She was left with a strong German accent.
Other cases have ben reported in USA. An example is Judi Roberts (age 57) AKA as Tiffany Noel who lived in indiana had a stroke. She ended up with an English (England) accent.
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