How does Foreign Accent Syndrome work??

[00:00:00]Imagine waking up in a hospital bed after a head injury, a stroke, or a severe migraine. You open your mouth to speak to the doctor and instead of your normal everyday native accent. You sound like you just stepped off a plane from a completely different country. And I don't mean like Canada either. You've never lived there. You might not even speak that language. But suddenly your friends, family, and doctors all swear you sound distinctly French, Jamaican, or Russian.

[00:00:24]>> But I say, "Why am I speaking it like this?"

[00:00:27]She said, "No, you sound like you can whip a Chinese."

[00:00:30]>> And all of a sudden, I was talking in an Irish accent.

[00:00:33]>> This sounds like a cheesy plot device from a '90s soap opera.

[00:00:36]>> Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

[00:00:42]>> But it is a real documented and incredibly rare medical condition known as foreign accent syndrome or FAS. It's also kind of maybe a little BS for the people who develop it. It can be a terrifying and isolating experience, but for linguists and neuroscientists, FAS is a profound window into how the human brain coordinates the incredibly complex machinery of speech. And it reveals some bizarre truths about human psychology and unconscious bias. Are we still allowed to say unconscious bias?

[00:01:14]Whatever. I'm an independent educator. I can say what I please. Point is, the people who are diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome are being failed by doctors. and we're going to talk today about how and about how they're not being helped by the media either. You asked and I'm answering to the best of my ability. If you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones. I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. And here on the channel, I discuss everything related to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture. If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications. Today, we're talking about foreign accent syndrome. This is Language Jones.

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[00:03:22]Registration closes on July 20th. So don't wait until the last minute. Secure your spot before registration closes and let's make some real progress. All right. To understand what's actually happening here, we have to look inside the brain language center. Specifically, two key areas. Broca's area and Vernica's area. This is your periodic reminder that for a little while early in my grad school career, my wife, who is not a linguist, thought that Broke and Worick were somehow related to Hankka's area. Anyway, Vernick's area, located in the temporal lobe, is your brain's language processing center. It handles comprehension, understanding what others are saying, and making sure that the words that you choose make logical sense. In almost all cases of foreign accent syndrome, Vernicazaria is completely untouched. Sufferers know exactly what they want to say and their vocabulary and grammar remains totally normal. Damage to verniceria is disconcerting because you end up talking like somebody who speaks normally but the content is like jabberwocky. I had a family member years ago who had a lesion on the vernic area and they called my mom to tell her what the doctors had found. She said they found more motorcycles in the forest. Her intended meaning was of course like more tumors in the brain. Here's another example.

[00:04:38]>> What are you doing today?

[00:04:40]>> We stayed with the water over here at the moment and talk with the people for them over there. They're diving for them at the moment. They'll save him the moment. He'll have water very soon for him.

[00:04:52]>> So that's not what's happening. Instead, the breakdown happens further forward in Broca's area located in the frontal lobe. Broca's area is the motor coordination center for speech. It's the conductor of an orchestra made up of your tongue, lips, vocal cords, and pallet. To produce a single sentence, your brain has to coordinate dozens of muscles with millisecond level precision, controlling the exact timing of air flow and muscle tension. When Broca's area or the neural pathways connecting to it are damaged, that precise motor control is disrupted. A severe version of Broca's aphasia is basically Hodor from Game of Thrones.

[00:05:29]>> Hodor. Hodor.

[00:05:34]or this famous example at least among linguists.

[00:05:36]>> But tell me why is it that you're moving? Actually, >> this can cause a mild form of araxia of speech. The speaker hasn't lost their language, they've lost the fine-tuned subconscious muscle memory required to hit the exact phonetic targets of their native dialect. They might start lengthening their vowels, altering the timing between syllables, or struggling to transition cleanly between certain consonant sounds. Here's an example of a woman who shared her story who had a stroke and has a praxia of speech.

[00:06:15]>> My name is Gina.

[00:06:27]I am 43. year old.

[00:06:32]>> And this brings us to the most challenging aspect of foreign accent syndrome. The accent is a hallucination.

[00:06:38]To a trained linguist's ear, the person with foreign accent syndrome does not actually have the accent they are purported to have developed. If an American develops FAS and everyone says that they sound British, a British linguist will listen to them and say that sounds nothing like any speech community in the UK. The altered speech patterns are never phonetically consistent with a real geographic dialect. Here's an example from a news story in Houston where the correspondent credulously repeats that she sounds quote like Mary Poppins.

[00:07:08]>> Everyone only sees um Mary Poppins or he is Mary Poppins. They send in a psychiatrist at the hospital. You know, they make sure you're not alone.

[00:07:17]>> Did you hear that? Let's listen to just the word send.

[00:07:21]>> They send in a psychiatrist.

[00:07:22]>> She's got the pen pen merger. synonym >> completely normal for any woman from Texas, black or white, but not part of a British accent, which does not merge I and E before nasals. Or take this woman who's reported to have developed an Irish accent.

[00:07:37]>> She's been diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome. Typically, the accent stays the same, but hers changed from Jamaican to Irish.

[00:07:46]>> When you have a brain injury and you're in under anesthesia, that's typically when the foreign accent syndrome comes out. And it's an accent uh typically of someplace you've not been. So I've not been to Ireland, so I don't have somebody around me that has an Irish accent.

[00:08:03]>> Instead, what we're witnessing is a fascinating case of unconscious cognitive bias on the part of the listener. Human brains are aggressive pattern recognition machines. We hate randomness. When a listener hears someone with FAS speak, their brain notices that the speech sounds slightly atypical. Maybe the rhythm is a bit more syllable timed or a vowel is a bit more clipped. Because the brain doesn't want to process this as neurological motor damage, it searches its internal database for a familiar pattern that matches these quirky sounds, the ones that we notice. It looks at the altered vowels and says, "Aha, that sounds a bit like a French accent." Once the listener's brain latches onto that narrative, confirmation bias takes over.

[00:08:45]They literally hallucinate the foreign accent, filtering the speaker's broken native phonetic targets through the lens of a stereotype. Filter lens stereotype.

[00:08:55]I am mixing metaphors. Anyway, it's an acoustic illusion. And acoustic illusions like this are not remotely uncommon. We know that depending on what movements you see, you may perceive different sounds despite hearing the same audio waveform and what's called the Mgherk effect. Baba ba ba ba baba baba baba baba baba. We know that the same audio can be perceived as having a foreign accent if it's paired with a face that looks foreign from a series of studies starting in the 1990s. These were super interesting, by the way, because they basically found that people judged non-white women in pictures as being worse teachers because of their accents.

[00:09:41]But the same audio paired with a picture of a white woman was rated higher and nobody mentioned an accent at all.

[00:09:48]Tragically, this listener bias creates a massive psychological burden for the sufferers. Imagine dealing with all the trauma of a brain injury only to have everyday people accuse you of faking a fake accent for attention. Sufferers are often treated as a walking joke or a medical curiosity. All because we choose to hear a foreign traveler rather than a patient undergoing a neurological rehabilitation. Foreign accent syndrome reminds us that language is about more than just the words we choose. It's a complicated and not fully understood feat of neurological processing. And just as importantly, it proves that an accent doesn't only exist in the mouth of the speaker, but it's also in some ways constructed in the ear of the listener. and we're terrible at that.

[00:10:29]What bothers me is not that people get diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome, despite it clearly being arraia in most cases and a psychological issue in others. It's not even that non-speists treat an accent as a foreign accent when in reality it's not systematically related to another language or dialect at all. What bothers me is the dozens of credulous news reports that claim that you can wake up from a coma either with a British or French or Italian accent or wake up from a coma fluently speaking another language when it's simply not the case. Weirdly, Dr. Phil got it right.

[00:11:04]>> Let me define foreign accent syndrome for you.

[00:11:07]>> Okay. Uh, foreign accent syndrome is a speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a foreign accent. They're not actually speaking with a foreign accent.

[00:11:26]>> If you want more of these moments, you can sign up for the weight list and updates for my upcoming self-paced digital internal linguistics, the language blueprint, at www.languagejones.com/ languagejones.com/bloopprint.

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[00:11:46]Have you ever heard an audio clip of someone with foreign accent syndrome?

[00:11:50]Did your brain try to map it to a specific country? Let me know in the comments. Drop a like. Subscribe for more deep dives into linguistics and the mysteries of the human brain. And I'll see you next time. Until then, happy learning.