Foreign Accent Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes And Treatment
Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare and little-researched clinical condition, but it poses one of the great enigmas of neuroscience in relation to language. Broadly speaking, it is a condition in which a person suddenly and without apparent explanation acquires an accent other than their native one.
In this article We explain what Foreign Accent Syndrome is what are its main characteristics and what science has found so far.
Foreign Accent Syndrome is characterized by the sudden presence of an accent different from that of the mother tongue, while speech proceeds normally. It was described for the first time in 1907 by the neurologist Pierre Marie, however few cases have been investigated.
It generally occurs after strokes and occurs apparently suddenly. The person begins to speak in his or her native language with complete intelligibility, but with an apparently foreign accent that cannot be avoided and that the person himself does not recognize as his own
Symptoms
The accent is recognized by other people as different from that of the mother tongue, although it is not necessarily identified as that of a specific language. In other words, the accent is heard and interpreted by others as foreign, because significant changes are identified in the pronunciation of some syllables, consonants and vowels which are considered key to the mother tongue, but do not necessarily correspond completely to another accent.
Listeners may recognize that the speaker uses his or her native language (for example, Spanish), but with an accent that may be French, English, German, or any other, which varies according to the opinions of the listeners. That is to say, there is generally no agreement on what the perceived accent is, which is why it is also called Pseudoforeign Accent Syndrome.
This syndrome has been related to a neuromotor alteration, with which It is also defined as an acquired alteration of the bean, in which the central nervous system plays a very important role. It may be accompanied by manifestations related to language and communication disorders such as aphasia and dysarthria, although not necessarily.
Representative clinical cases
González-Álvarez, J., Parcet-Ibars, MA, Ávila, C. et al. (2003) have conducted a review of the scientific literature on Foreign Accent Syndrome, and they tell us that the first documented case was in 1917. It was a Parisian who developed an “Alsatian” accent after receiving a war injury that had caused right hemiparesis.
Thirty years later, another of the best-known cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome was published, where a 30-year-old Norwegian woman suffered a frontotemporoparietal injury after being a victim of a Nazi bombing, and consequently, her accent began to be recognized by listeners as German.
Due to the extremely conflictive context in which she found herself, her German accent caused her different problems in doing everyday things, since she was identified as German.
Cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome have also been described in the scientific literature. without having had previous experience of living with a second language These are almost always monolingual people.
Associated medical conditions and possible causes
Many of the cases that have been investigated describe the appearance of the syndrome after having been diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia, transcortical motor aphasia, and lesions in the subcortical white matter in specific gyri.
In addition to the language motor areas, other brain areas that have been related to Foreign Accent Syndrome have been the precentral gyrus, the inferior central gyrus, the corpus callosum and the insular cortex. Likewise, the relationship with the Rolando fissure and the temporal areas has been investigated.
More generally, the medical causes related to Foreign Accent Syndrome are mainly strokes in the left hemisphere in relation to the areas that participate in the automation of complex motor behaviors (such as speech, which requires very important neuromuscular coordination).
Currently this syndrome is being investigated in relation to the neuronal areas that regulate articulation, the acquisition of native speech and a second language, however there is no agreement on the methodological options that would be decisive to find a definitive explanation for this syndrome.
For this same reason, there is not enough information about prognoses and treatments, although some auditory and sensory feedback techniques have been tested that seek to modify verbal fluency, as well as auditory masking techniques with noise which have been found satisfactory when treating, for example, stuttering, since people tend to improve their verbal fluency when they stop hearing their own voice.
