A case of spontaneous onset of foreign accent syndrome occurred in New Zealand
Earlier this week, New Zealand resident Bronwyn Fox woke up as usual in the morning, but not as usual - speaking with a strong accent, similar to a mixture of Welsh, Scottish and North London accent. Despite the fact that Bronwyn is a third generation New Zealander and has never traveled to the UK. Surprised by this change, the woman immediately called her close friends, but they decided that they were just playing a trick and hung up, science said.
- People ask me - where am I from, - Mrs. Fox shares her experiences, - and when I answer that from Vinton, they ask again about where I come from, and it is hard for them to believe that the accent came just from my head.
The only one who treats the situation with humor is the woman's husband. In an interview with France Presse, he stated:
- It's pretty fun and funny. Sometimes even relieves boredom.
A woman not so long ago began to suffer from multiple sclerosis. And after changing the focus on her MRI scans, doctors saw two new lesions in the back of the brain. Mrs. Fox's attending physician believes that changes in speech are associated with these injuries, but, alas, she cannot help.
Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare disorder that can change people's speech beyond recognition. In the dossier of "KP" there are several examples of strange cases when people suddenly spoke in a previously unknown language.
So in 1978, Nikolai Lipatov from the Vologda region, having been hit by lightning, miraculously survived and, unexpectedly for himself and those around him, began to speak fluently in three European languages.
In 1987, in the Tula region, pensioner Gennady Sergeevich Smirnov was pressed against a fence with a trailer. The strongest blow fell on the head. And the next day he suddenly began to speak the language of Goethe. Although earlier, when during the Great Patriotic War he was in captivity, he heard German speech, but did not understand it and could only use common stamps such as "hand hoh".
In 1995, a pensioner Vera Vitalievna Roshchina from Volgograd, after a heart disease, not only discovered a craving for all kinds of languages, but also incredible ability to quickly count, becoming almost a human computer.
This is how Karina SHIPKOVA, a senior researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry of the Ministry of Health of the Department of Speech Pathology, comments on this phenomenon:
- You cannot become a polyglot overnight. Surely the languages in which these people suddenly began to speak were known to them before. "Foreign speech syndrome" is associated with damage to the temporal regions of the brain, most often the right hemisphere, the function of which is emotional expressiveness, tempo and individual characteristics of speech. The main causes of the syndrome are trauma, stroke, and atrophy of nerve cells. In case of brain damage, the information laid down in childhood is disturbed to a lesser extent than that which is absorbed later. Therefore, in case of a failure, new information is quickly erased, and the well-forgotten old pops up.
Most often in medical practice, there are cases when people begin to speak their native language with a foreign accent. Less often - when the speech of an adult suddenly becomes like the speech of a small child. Intellectuals who know several languages, after suffering a stroke, can begin to speak with an accent and weave words of a foreign language into their native speech.