Foreign Accent Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes And Treatment
What would you think if one day you woke up suddenly speaking your native language with the accent of another country? You would be suffering from what scientists call foreign accent syndrome (SAE) or pseudo-foreign accent.
This is a phenomenon described by the French neurologist Pierre Marie in 1907. He recounted the case of a Parisian. After suffering a stroke, he began to speak with an Alsatian accent.
Foreign accent syndrome is a rare neurological language disorder documented in up to 20 specific studies. As a result of a brain injury, mainly subcortical, the patient’s speech therefore acquires a strange sound for native listeners. The person cannot avoid this strange accent. Given its sudden onset, this disorder can generate the feeling of a loss of identity.
Symptoms may persist for months or years or disappear spontaneously or gradually ; and in a smaller number of cases it appears briefly in patients with psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia and conversive disorders. Additionally, many of those affected do not recognize that their accent has changed. And are surprised when we point it out to them.
What are the symptoms of foreign accent syndrome?
Clinically, it is characterized by deficits:
- Segmental : greater alteration of vowels than consonants, alteration of vowel pronunciation time, in some patients it is shorter, in others longer; at the level of consonants there are changes and pronunciation errors
- Prosodic : the rhythm and intonation of words and sentences decreased over time between each syllable, the insertion of vowels, a poor transition between each word. Inversion of the key of a phrase
The main difficulties are:
- Modifications of grammatical, articular and prosodic elements, without manifestation of difficulties in the comprehension and expression of language and without phonetic distortions
- The lack of verbal fluency appears as in aphasia and apraxia. However, unlike these alterations, the patient’s speech result does not appear pathological but looks strange.
There is no evidence of impaired functionality in everyday life. However, the emotional implication that this disorder presents often leads to the appearance of negative psychosocial consequences in the lives of these patients. This has indeed been described in various studies.
Causes
It is therefore an unexpected language disorder that modifies the linguistic model of the mother tongue. So that the patient, his relatives and the therapist perceive a dialect different from their original language.
Among the main etiologies linked to this syndrome are stroke, head trauma, which affects areas related to the production and expression of language, as well as other pathologies such as multiple sclerosis, tumors brain or anesthesia, among other causes.
Foreign accent syndrome can persist for months or years, or go away spontaneously or gradually. However, there are people in whom it is chronic, requiring speech therapists and cognitive therapies, because this disease can generate, in people who suffer from it, a great psychological impact seeing that time passes and that they do not. can not recover their true voice, and sometimes, nor remember them.
Until now, the usual treatment in such cases has been the application of therapies. And linguistic techniques. These allowed sufferers to recover, if not all, part of their diction before the onset of the syndrome. In addition, emphasis reduction techniques are used. And the patient learns to move the lips or jaw in a more appropriate way during language.
In 2010, scientists at the University of Malaga combined these rehabilitation exercises with the prescription of the drug donepezil, which is commonly used to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Thanks to this joint treatment, they observed “very visible” healing symptoms in a Spanish patient with the disease. Other techniques thus include masked auditory feedback, delayed auditory feedback, and frequency-changing auditory feedback.
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