Are you buying this as a real affliction or as some made up medical quackery?



Discuss.


for those that don't know...check out this video with Diane Sawyer
http://abcnews.go.com/vid...id=6244704


courtesy of wiki
Foreign accent syndrome is a rare medical condition involving speech production that usually occurs as a side effect of severe brain injury, such as a stroke or a head injury. Two cases have been reported of individuals with the condition as a development problem [1] and one associated with severe migraine. [2] Between 1941 and 2009, there have been sixty recorded cases.[1] Its symptoms result from distorted articulatory planning and coordination processes. It must be emphasized that the speaker does not suddenly gain a foreign language (vocabulary, syntax, grammar, etc); they merely pronounce their native language with a foreign or dialectical accent. Despite a recent unconfirmed news report that a Croatian speaker has gained the ability to speak fluent German after emergence from a coma[3], there has been no verified case where a patient's foreign language skills have improved after a brain injury.

what if this is all just stored information on the brain that has all of a sudden become accessible due to head trauma? or what if these folk are fake as a 12 dollar bill?

No. "It must be emphasized that the speaker does not suddenly gain a foreign language (vocabulary, syntax, grammar, etc); they merely pronounce their native language with a foreign or dialectical accent."

That one case where a croation speaker all of a sudden spoke fluent german is unconfirmed.

But it is nevertheless interesting that a change in accent can happen. Maybe that has to do with information stored in the brain when that person was hearing other languages at some point, or longer periods, in their life.

Tremolina said:

That's what I'm thinking. Unless Noam Chomsky is correct that there is a sort of innate Universal Grammar (which I'm yet unsold on) -- and that strange corners of that cognitive pool could somehow be accidentally stumbled into -- it seems the brain would need some archive from which to pull foreign accent and syntactical stuff.

There is currently a woman in England who is supposedly experiencing this syndrome. She suffers from migraine headaches, and after a particularly bad episode, she was left -- albeit still an English speaker -- with the accent and syntax of Standard Mandarin, which she and her family claim she's never spoken. She hates it and has been trying to lose the accent for quite some time now. She was interviewed on Canadian public radio just last week, and it was really odd.
[Edited 4/27/10 3:25am]

Heard about this before twice...I'm going to say maybe it's a past life thing...something triggers a memory...i don't know.

Also, with all the different accents we hear throughout our lives, how is once accessed over the others? I mean is anyone gonna one day wake up with a Bronx accent or a Nigerian accent?

DesireeNevermind said:

Bronx accent? I always lived in the Bronx...don't know if I speak with a Bronc accent.

peacenlovealways said:

You do and it's too cute. Now those Long Island accents have got to go.