A Case of Foreign Accent Syndrome Resulting in Regional Dialect

Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences - Tập 35 Số 3 - Trang 360-365 - 2008
Raveeni Naidoo1, Erin M. Warriner2, Wieslaw Oczkowski3, Alexandre Sévigny4, Karin R. Humphreys5
1Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, Burlington, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
2Integrated Stroke Unit, Hamilton Health Sciences
3Department of Medicine, Division of Neurology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
4Departments of Communication Studies & Multimedia - French, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
5Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Tóm tắt

Background:Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare acquired syndrome following neurological damage that results in articulatory distortions that are commonly perceived as a “foreign” accent. The nature of the underlying deficit of FAS remains controversial. We present the first reported Canadian case study of FAS following a stroke. We describe a stroke patient, RD, who suffered an acute infarction to the left internal capsule, basal ganglia and frontal corona radiata. She was diagnosed as having FAS without any persistent aphasic symptoms. Family, friends, and health care professionals similarly described her speech as sounding like she had a Canadian East Coast accent, a reported change from her native Southern Ontario accent.Method:An investigation of this case was pursued, incorporating neuroimaging, neuropsychological and speech pathology assessments, and formalized linguistic analyses.Results:Linguistic analyses confirmed that RD’s speech does in fact have salient aspects of Atlantic Canadian English in terms of both prosodic and segmental characteristics. However, her speech is not entirely consistent with an Atlantic Canadian English accent.Interpretation:The fact that RD’s speech is perceived as a regional variant of her native language, rather than the “generic foreign accent” of FAS described elsewhere, suggests that the perceived “foreignness” in FAS is not primarily due to dysfluencies which indicate a non-native speaker, but rather due to very subtle motor-planning deficits which give rise to systemic changes in specific phonological segments. This has implications for the role of the basal ganglia in speech production.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Carbary, 2000, Foreign accent syndrome following a catastrophic second injury: MRI correlates, linguistic and voice pattern analyses, Brain Cogn., 43, 78

Yorkston, 1984, Assessment of intelligibility of dysarthric speech

10.1097/00001756-200410050-00025

10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.119

10.1017/CBO9780511611759

10.1016/0093-934X(87)90071-X

McNeil, 1997, Clinical management of sensorimotor speech disorders, 311

10.1080/13554790591006302

10.3109/02699209008985492

10.1016/j.jneuroling.2006.03.008

Ingram, 1992, J Phonetics., 20, 457, 10.1016/S0095-4470(19)30650-3

Coelho, 2001, Acoustic analyses of foreign accent syndrome: an examination of three explanatory models, J Med Speech-Lang Pa., 9, 227

10.1038/384159a0

Kurowksi, 1996, The foreign accent syndrome: a reconsideration, Brain Lang., 54, 1, 10.1006/brln.1996.0059

10.1212/01.WNL.0000152156.90779.89

10.1080/026870300401577

Goodglass, 2001, The assessment of aphasia and related disorders

10.1016/j.jneuroling.2006.03.003

Thông tin
Thông tin xuất bản

Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences

Tập 35 Số 3

360-365

Thông tin tác giả